


collecting regrets (like old friends)

by avalanches



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Not K-Pop Idols, Crime Scenes, Detectives, Ghosts, M/M, Mild Gore, Murder Investigations, Murder Mystery, Supernatural Elements, criminal investigations, yeah idk what else to tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:08:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26769994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avalanches/pseuds/avalanches
Summary: “Stop calling yourself a murderer.”Mark turns back to look at him, eyebrows raised. “Why? I am one. Call a spade a spade, detective.”“You’re a murder victim now, at least to me. So why don't you tell me who killed you?"Mark stares at him, lips pressed together tightly, and his expression is far too serious on his young face untouched by age. Forever now, Donghyuck supposes, since he’s staring at the visage of a dead man whose body is lying in the morgue.“That’s for you to find out.”-alternatively: Donghyuck is a detective who can see the ghosts of murder victims he encounters and talk to them. He's never met one like Mark Lee though.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 14
Kudos: 113





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunshyun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshyun/gifts).



> this was originally started a birthday present to vic, but i realised it's october so spooky month, so happy early birthday vic? i hope you enjoy whatever this is /waves hands vaguely/ i'm planning to finish it by the time your birthday actually comes so :D 
> 
> very loosely based off an episode from the japanese drama [border](https://www.netflix.com/sg/title/80200155). ao3 user avalanches stop coming up with plots based off japanese dramas challenge. 
> 
> title from [shake it out by florence + the machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbN0nX61rIs)
> 
> comments/kudos/feedback are always appreciated!

There’s a boy in front of Donghyuck. 

He looks up into black hair, round brown eyes, and an angular jaw. The boy just stares at him, hands tucked loosely into the the pockets of his oversized slacks, lips pressed together as he stares down at Donghyuck who is in the midst of petting a cat. Said cat hisses, snaps at Donghyuck’s fingers (it narrowly misses) and darts off into the alleyway beside them, disappearing into the shadows. 

Donghyuck sighs. He stares into the darkness of the alley, trying to follow the feline with his eyes before giving up completely. Man, he had been planning on entertaining himself for a few more minutes. 

“What do you want?” He dusts off his own work slacks before standing back up, eyes carefully combing the empty street, yellow in the light of the setting sun behind him. 

The boy shifts, and there is no shadow falling behind him as he stands directly on Donghyuck’s. “Find Lee Taeyong. He’s the answer.” 

Donghyuck scuffs his heels on the gravel, ears picking up on the faint sound of a car engine as it nears them. “That’s not helpful at all. We don’t know anything about you.” 

He is met with silence. Donghyuck turns around, and the black of the boy’s hair bleeds into the brilliant yellow of the sun, flickering in and out. His lips are pressed together tightly, skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. He looks at Donghyuck in the eye steadily and refuses to look away. 

“Find Lee Taeyong,” he repeats, and Donghyuck is momentarily distracted by how the sun flares around him, encircling him in a bright yellow halo as the car engine increases in volume in the background. “He will give you the answers that you need.” 

Donghyuck turns around as the screech of tires on gravel rings in his ears. Johnny pokes his head out from the driver’s seat and smiles brightly at him. 

“Done with your cat time already, Hyuckie?” 

“Don’t call me that, hyung,” Donghyuck sighs, walking over to the passenger side. Johnny pops up the door for him, grins at him as he fastens his seat belt and pulls out his phone. “It got spooked by your car and ran away, you know how paranoid cats are with vehicles.” 

“Not my fault,” Johnny throws the car into reverse and smoothly turns it around so that they are facing the direction that he had come from. He nods at the glove compartment in front of Donghyuck. “The files are in there, we identified the victim. Turns out he was involved in a case of his own, about ten years back when he was a high-schooler.” 

Donghyuck clicks open the glove compartment, eyes the reflection of the street behind them in the side-view mirror of Johnny’s car. He finds the files easily enough without looking, notes the year on the cover and the tell-tale yellowing of the papers that peek through the dark brown of the file. Johnny steps on the accelerator, and Donghyuck keeps his eyes on the side-view mirror as his boss eases the car out of the street. 

The road behind them is empty, bathed in the garish yellow wash of the sunset. 

\-- 

“His name is Mark Lee. He committed murder when he was fifteen ten years ago.” 

The face of the boy he had met on the street stares back at him from the case report dated ten years back. A little smaller, but a little rounder with baby fat that had yet to be shed, black hair messy and unstyled falling over his forehead and curling around his ears. Donghyuck taps his pen on the table, ignores the death glare Renjun sends his way before straightening up to look at Johnny who is giving the briefing at the front of the room. 

“He was found guilty of the murder of his roommate, Lee Jeno,” Johnny presses a button on his clicker and a photograph of Jeno pops up on the screen. “They said that he had been a little unhinged, involved with the mafia and gangs at a young age after being abandoned by his parents when he turned thirteen. Lee Taeyong, a tutor at the cram school that he had been attending before his parents left, took him in little over a year after and let him live with him and his brother, Jeno. However, one day, when Taeyong was at work, Mark got high on drugs and murdered Jeno in cold blood. The neighbours heard the screams and called 911. Police showed up and arrested him on the spot. The blood on his hands was still wet when the handcuffs were put on him.” 

“He didn’t get jail time though,” Renjun muses, rifling through his own copies of the case, “influence of drugs and whatnot, apparently. Not to mention he had been a minor when the crime was committed. He was put on permanent probation though, has to report back every other week or so and account for his whereabouts. They even put a tracker on him.” 

“This case really caused quite a bit of chaos in that small town back then,” Jungwoo nods at Johnny, and the screen blinks to show newspaper clippings instead, Mark’s fifteen-year-old face plastered all over them. _Teenage Murderer: Did he really deserve his sentence of zero jail time? Teenage Criminal: Justice Unserved? Fifteen-year-old murderer gets away with no jail!_

“Many of them think that he should have gone to jail,” Johnny sighs, and the rustling of papers is loud in the sterile briefing room. Renjun drops his pen and it’s Donghyuck’s turn to shoot him a glare instead. “That explains why there was absolutely no pity for him when his body was discovered by one of the residents.” 

The screen now shows Mark’s face, ten years older, eyes closed and lips pale, blood splattered across his face. The front of the oversized cheap blazer and white cotton shirt on him has red splashed across the front, and Donghyuck thinks that despite the gruesome scene, Mark’s face is serene, almost like he had died in his sleep. 

“It is for sure a crime of passion, that we can say,” Jungwoo gestures towards the screen and they are greeted with the sight of Mark’s naked chest, clean from the blood, but there are _so many_ gashes all over his thin chest, pale skin stretched tight across prominent ribs. “As you can see, he is quite malnourished. But as you can also see, there are fifteen stab wounds in his chest, all quite deep, all done with a serrated kitchen knife strong enough to pierce through bone, but there is quite a lot of force behind each stab. The blood must have splattered onto the attacker as well, as he was alive, but most likely he was dealt the fatal blow when unconscious.” 

Jungwoo circles one particular stab wound with his laser pointer, one right over the heart. “This is the killing blow, and the first one as well. Whoever kidnapped him to kill must have wanted him dead immediately, so they stabbed him through the heart first, before proceeding to stab him multiple times in his chest. The high number indicates possible resentment, thus my conclusion labeling it as a crime of passion. It is no way a clean or professional job at all.” 

“So our prime suspect is Lee Taeyong?” 

Lee Taeyong is beautiful, Donghyuck thinks, from the photos that they have dug out from the system. Ethereal in a way that makes him look like a pixie in the movies or a character straight out of the animes that Jisung loves to watch. He shrugs, continues on. “Since the evidence and analysis points to a crime of passion, it is possible that any one in the town would have committed it. They all hate that a murderer did not get the sentence he deserved, no? But then, the person who suffered the most, the victim’s brother, the one who had extended his home and care to Mark, is the one to hold the most resentment as he had suffered the most out of this murder ten years ago. Crime of passion, bitterness, resentment, hatred; they all point towards Lee Taeyong as the most plausible suspect in the murder of Mark Lee.” 

_Find Lee Taeyong_. He remembers Mark’s words to him, in the middle of the street with the sunset enveloping them and the way Mark’s existence flitted in and out with the rays of the sun, how it seemed to completely shine through him at certain points. He remembers the look in Mark’s eyes, how he had stared into Donghyuck’s eyes, no expression on his face. Mark’s gaze had been absolutely devoid of any emotion other than desperation and resolution, his face flat and smooth, but tensed in a way that spoke of anguish and desolation. 

Johnny clears his throat. “Yes, that’s why we need to speak to him first. But before we do that, this was found in the victim’s apartment. It seems that he was writing a book.” 

“ _Confessions of a Teenage Murderer_ ,” Renjun reads aloud from the screen, eyebrows furrowed in thought as he stares at the thick bundle of papers held together by a large binder clip, sealed in an evidence bag in Johnny’s hand. “Huh, do you think it might have been the trigger that forced the hand to murder him?” 

Johnny shrugs, throws the manuscript down onto the table in front of the screen. It lands with a flat _thump_ that rings too loudly in the room, as all small sounds do. “Who knows? That’s our job to find out, I guess.” 

\-- 

Donghyuck stares down the very handsome man sitting opposite the table, dressed neatly in a white t-shirt and black jeans with a dark blue apron over it. They are at a cafe, at a table tucked away in the corner, and Jung Jaehyun is the owner of this quaint establishment and the barista who had brewed the cup of coffee before Donghyuck on the table personally. 

“Mr Jung,” he flips open his notebook, “it states here that you are childhood friends with Mr Lee Taeyong. You’ve also lived in this town your entire life, and you opened this cafe after you returned from attending university in the nearby city for three years.” 

“That’s correct,” there is something shifty about Jaehyun’s body language, the way that he speaks and the way that he crosses his legs as he answers Donghyuck. He tips his chin up, keeps eye contact with Donghyuck, hands clasped loosely in his lap. Donghyuck can’t tell exactly why he’s shifty, he’s just suspicious to his eyes, and one thing that Donghyuck has learnt from being a police detective for about five years now is that you have to trust your gut. Right now, his gut is telling him that Jaehyun is guilty, or at least complicit in the crime of murdering Mark Lee.

He blinks. Mark Lee is standing behind Jaehyun now, tall, gangly, and dressed in clothes that are out of place in this posh cafe that Jaehyun owns. He’s watching the other man carefully, eyes still flat and devoid of any emotion. He looks up at Donghyuck, meets his eyes, and nods before simply turning left and walking through the window of the cafe out of the detective’s sight. 

“Detective, are you going to stare into thin air or question me? I would appreciate it if you do this fast because I do have a business to run, you know.” 

Donghyuck taps his foot on the floor, picks up his pen. “Patience, Mr Jung. These questions will take time. I’m sure your part-timers will keep business running well enough.” 

Jaehyun laughs, and the sound is ugly to Donghyuck’s ears, jarring when coming out of such a perfect mouth with pink lips on an exceptionally handsome face. 

“They better,” he smiles at Donghyuck, and the expression makes his stomach churn for some goddamn reason. Jaehyun continues smiling at him, honey brown curls falling into his crinkled brown eyes, and Donghyuck just _knows_ that he’s guilty _somehow_. 

“I do love this town,” Jaehyun sighs wistfully, staring at the street outside his cafe with a fondness in his eyes that only makes Donghyuck feel even more queasy. 

“After all,” his dark brown eyes are back on Donghyuck, “I would protect it with my life. I would do anything, _anything_ , to keep things peaceful here in my hometown.” 

\-- 

Donghyuck downs half a bottle of Pocari Sweat, wipes his mouth, and wolfs down the sandwich that he had bought from the convenience store down the road before he decides to speak. He had pointedly ignored the small, translucent figure perched on the grassy slope a few feet away from him, a thin frame dressed in tawdry clothes too big, a face too expressionless for someone so young. The sun is setting again in the distant horizon, dyeing the grass a pale gold and cutting through the other figure, leaving no trace of a shadow. 

“Jaehyun doesn’t like you.”

Mark doesn’t flinch at that. “No one in this town does, even before I killed Jeno. I was an outcast you know. Bad kid, abandoned by parents who didn’t want him, roped into drugs and gangs at a young age, flunking out of school even before being orphaned. Taeyong was the only one who felt any form of sympathy for me, which is why he opened his home to me.” 

“And you repaid him by killing his brother when you were high,” Donghyuck wipes his fingers on the condensation gathered on the bottle of his drink. “What a grateful child you were.” 

“Man,” Mark winces at that, “nothing reminds you more of your death than when people refer to you in the past tense.” 

Donghyuck doesn’t bother answering. He crumples the plastic wrapper of his sandwich and shoves it into his pocket, keeps his fists balled up there as he waits. 

“I guess I was dead for a long time, even before I died,” Mark’s voice is a whisper that settles into the wind and drifts into Donghyuck’s ears. “No one really wanted me alive, even before I became a murderer, and especially _not_ after I killed the younger brother of the only man in town who opened his arms to me. Taeyong has always been too kind for his own good, honestly. Even I knew that.” 

“Then why did you write that book?” Donghyuck hasn’t read it. He can’t find it in his sleep-deprived head to process words that aren’t part of reports or case files. 

Mark shifts, but his clothes make no sound. Donghyuck just waits, keeps an eye on the empty road behind them. He pulls his hands out from his pocket, twists open the cap of his half-empty Pocari Sweat, and takes another sip. 

\--

_“He had gone to many big publishing companies before he came to us, but they turned him down. Didn’t want to publish a book written by a fucking teenage murderer who killed his friend, they all said. It would be like taking his side, saying that he was innocent, apparently.”_

_Moon Taeil looks up from the manuscript sealed in the evidence bag on the table, round glasses perched on his nose. Donghyuck takes a sip of the watered down coffee that had been offered to them, watches out of the corner of his eye as Johnny scribbles down something in his notebook. Mark is perched on the arm of the sofa that the two officers were seated on, eyes locked on Taeil with something like affection and gratitude swimming in them._

_“But if you read through this,” Taeil reaches out to tap a finger on the manuscript, the plastic crinkling under the pressure, “you will realise that it actually doesn’t blame anyone or anything for the crime that he committed. It’s just a reflection of his past, of how he believes that he has been unwanted since the very beginning, of how he has felt nothing but regret after killing and hurting the one person in the very town that only spoke spiteful words about him behind his back and to his face. He doesn’t blame anyone but himself, for committing a crime, and he just wants to say something for once, instead of having his presence and voice drowned out by the majority who condemned him and believed that he deserved to die.”_

_Donghyuck makes a note down in his own notebook. “It seems like that, judging from the majority of the villagers that we interviewed.”_

_He has heard all the cruel words said casually about the victim of the murder. Of Mark Lee, the pariah in this small town that had less than a thousand people, where everyone knew everyone and everyone knew of Mark Lee and the infamous murder that he had committed at the age of fifteen._

_~~“Well, justice has been served now, right?”~~ _

~~_“The murderer finally pays for his crime.”_ ~~

~~_“Whoever did this isn’t a murderer, they are a hero.”_ ~~

~~_“Finally, someone who gave Jeno and Taeyong the justice they deserve.”_ ~~

_The corners of Taeil’s mouth turn up in a painful smile, the expression strangely jagged and misplaced on his face. He smiles at Donghyuck and Johnny, gently pushes the manuscript sealed in an evidence bag back towards them before leaning back in his chair._

_Johnny’s expression is neutral as he takes the evidence back. “And why did you accept to publish his book?”_

_Taeil stares into the distance, fingers playing with the watch on his left wrist. When he answers, his voice is so faint, but the words are clear in Donghyuck’s ears._

_“I think he just wanted his voice to be heard against the others that drowned him out. He never had a say in his identity, his personality, or the things that he liked, you know? I don’t know who started it, but suddenly everyone was saying all these things about him, calling him all these awful names. Unwanted. Ungrateful. Failure. Screw-up. Loser. No one bothered to talk to him, to understand him, to empathise with what he has been through. They had decided that Mark Lee was the black sheep, the scapegoat of this small time, and the murder only made sure that the label was stuck on him permanently and not anyone else.”_

_Donghyuck realises that Mark is smiling, tears running down his cheeks, the emotion genuine and steeped into every inch of his face. He is looking at Taeil with the utmost gratitude shining out of his eyes, fist pressed to his mouth as the publisher looks down with the softest turn of his lips, this particular emotion comfortable and gentle on the older man’s face._

_“I just wanted to give him a voice. He just wanted to be heard. I wanted to give him at least that.”_

\--

Mark turns around to look at Donghyuck, and his eyes are soft and open. 

“I think Taeil explained that better than I could ever,” he muses, stretching his hands behind him and leaning back on his elbows. He looks away from the detective and stares across the river. 

“I loved this town,” Mark murmurs faintly, his eyes and mind far away from the present. “But this town didn’t love me back. It didn’t love me, even before I became a murderer. After I became one, it just hated me. Despised me. Decided that I was a cancer that needed to be removed.” 

Donghyuck stares at his hands. “Stop calling yourself a murderer.” 

Mark turns back to look at him, eyebrows raised. “Why? I am one. Call a spade a spade, detective.”

“You’re a murder victim now, at least to me,” Donghyuck tosses the crumpled ball of plastic from the sandwich wrapper up, catches it between his fist. The crinkling of the plastic echoes in the wind. “So why don’t you tell me who killed you?” 

Mark stares at him, lips pressed together tightly, and his expression is far too serious on his young face untouched by age. Forever now, Donghyuck supposes, since he’s staring at the visage of a dead man whose body is lying in the morgue. 

“That’s for you to find out,” Mark replies, turning his eyes away to look at the river before them again. Donghyuck rolls his eyes, and the crackle of plastic is loud as it gives way underneath the squeeze of his fingers. 

“How helpful.” 

“It’s not like that,” Mark shrugs, and his eyes are boring holes into the side of the detective’s head. “I was chloroformed on my way back from another job interview that I knew I wouldn’t get. I had just been fired a day before. Then when I woke up, I was looking at my dead body in the middle of the townfield and you were the only one who could see me.” 

Donghyuck scowls. “In other words, you don’t know who killed you.”

Mark blinks at the river. “Yeah. I don’t know who killed me.” 

“What a parrot,” Donghyuck says sarcastically, popping the cap off his Pocari Sweat and downing the rest of the ionic sports drink in one gulp. “What a dumb murder victim.” 

Mark sucks at his teeth, and there is absolutely no sound when he does it. “You’re the detective, not me. I’m just the victim.” 

Donghyuck has nothing to say to that. He screws the cap back onto the clear bottle and watches the sun glint off the crystal waters of the stream, untainted by pollution and garbage. Privileges of a small town tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the city with high-rise buildings and carbon monoxide emitting from cars packed on the roads like sardine cans. Maybe it would be nice to live here in a place like this, maybe after he retires, he thinks. Johnny always likes to go on and on about how he wants to transfer to the suburbs after he turns thirty-five, to just be the chief of a tiny station in a lazy town where the biggest crime is a high-schooler shoplifting in the convenience store. 

Small towns do attract big crimes though. That’s why they are here. The local station didn’t have enough manpower trained to deal with a murder, which is why Donghyuck is here, with the rest of his team headed by Johnny complete with Jungwoo, their very own medical examiner and forensic expert. 

“So how about it, Detective Lee Donghyuck. Will you find who killed me?” 

Donghyuck stares at him, entranced by way the sunlight cuts through the translucent strands of his dark hair when they are supposed to be opaque. He stares down at the empty bottle of Pocari Sweat in his hands, rubs his palms over the condensation gathered on the outside of the plastic and squeezes lightly. 

“Maybe. No promises.” 

Mark stands up and tucks his hands in the pockets of his trousers that are too big for him. “Maybe tell me also why you can see and talk to dead people?” 

Donghyuck rolls his eyes. “That is a lot a dead man is asking for.” 

“I _am_ dead,” Mark shrugs. “I can’t exactly talk to people anymore. Not like I did a lot of that when I was alive either. Comes with being the pariah of this small town.” 

“So you just want someone to talk to?” 

“Maybe?” The boy turns around to smile at him and Donghyuck’s breath catches in his throat by how beautiful he looks with his lips curved up, a gossamer of a silhouette against the blinding light of the setting sun that is nearly consumed by the line of the horizon. 

“How about it, Detective? Honour a dead man’s last wish, will you?” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i apologise in advance for any inaccuracies! please do let me know if anything is confusing or doesnt make sense. thank you for all of you who left comments/kudos/bookmarks on the first chapter!

“I need a man.” 

“Seconded.”

Donghyuck frowns. “Not like that, Jungwoo-hyung.” 

Jungwoo doesn’t look up from where he’s examining old photos of Lee Jeno’s corpse at the crime scene. “It still applies. You need some dick in you. Or a man. Preferably at least one. I don’t judge if you are game for more than one.” 

Donghyuck makes fake retching noises in response but Jungwoo doesn’t bat a single eyelid. Instead, he pulls out one of the photos and turns it around before sliding it across his desk. 

“What am I looking at?” 

Jungwoo taps a finger on the close-up on Lee Jeno’s chest. “Look at the gashes.” 

Mark Lee’s body flashes before his eyes - Jungwoo pulling apart his blood-soaked shirt to reveal his chest stained with red, gashes long and deep, scattered across his skinny torso and interrupting the raised parallel bumps of his ribs, scarily visible in the harsh yellow lighting. He looks up at the medical examiner who is idly twirling his ballpoint pen between his fingers. 

“It’s the same kind of knife.”

“Ding ding ding,” Jungwoo mimes hitting a triangle dramatically with his ballpoint pen before peeling out another photo and slapping it down beside the one facing Donghyuck. This photograph is newer, of course, the crime ten years later, and the victim much older, but there are similarities. The largest cut is the one directly on the heart, with the rest of the stab wounds littered over the rest of their chests, but Donghyuck can tell, even through the photographs, that the wounds were made with the same weapon, or at least one with an identical brand, make and design. He looks back up at Jungwoo and nearly flinches when he sees Mark Lee leaning against the shelf behind the medical examiner’s chair. 

Mark smiles at him and wriggles his fingers in a wave. Donghyuck tears his eyes hurriedly away from him to look back at Jungwoo. 

“Did you measure the cuts?” 

“Yeah,” Jungwoo shifts through the papers in front of him before pulling one out. “They are exactly the same, so it probably means it’s from the same brand, or same line. The stab wounds on Mark Lee’s chest are deeper, so it was probably driven into him with more force. But what’s unique about these murder weapons is that the serrated edge is slightly uneven on the end that is joined to the handle of the knife. It’s either the owner sanded it down to make it appear like that, or it might be a manufacturing error. We’re still trying to track down this particular pattern through the system, so I have my analysts working on that. But it is quite a unique feature, nonetheless.” 

Donghyuck swallows. Behind Jungwoo, Mark Lee nods thoughtfully, translucent fingers drumming a random rhythm on his forearm. _What a weirdo_ , Donghyuck thinks, _he’s just listening to people talk about the murder weapon that took his life like it’s just an interesting story._

“The murderer wants Mark Lee’s murder to be connected to Lee Jeno’s, obviously,” he exhales through his mouth as Jungwoo takes the photos back. “Did they ever get the murder weapon, the one from Lee Jeno’s case?” 

“Yeah,” Jungwoo nods, “but the evidence was apparently transported to the station in the city next over, which is why Johnny went to pick it up after lunch today. He went to get the rest of the files from there too, which is why I am running the serrated edge pattern through the system first to see if it picks anything up. The people who worked on this case ten years ago have all retired and moved away, and the files are gone, so I really don’t have access to much information. They haven’t gotten around to digitising the older case files, small town things, I guess. But once Johnny is back with the evidence, the murder weapon from ten years ago, and the rest of the reports and paperwork, the process should go much faster in terms of identifying the murder weapon for this murder.” 

Donghyuck nods. Mark blinks at him, smiles at him gently before turning around and vanishing through the door of Jungwoo’s office. God, this ghost is starting to be a pain in his ass.

“Hyuckie? What are you looking at?” 

Jungwoo is watching him carefully, eyes flickering between Donghyuck and the spot that Mark Lee had occupied with his ghostly phantom body just a moment ago. Donghyuck quickly pulls the corner of his lips up in a smile before waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. 

“Oh, nothing. I thought I saw a fly or mosquito, but I can’t tell. Bad eyesight things.”

Jungwoo blinks at him, but doesn’t say anything else. Donghyuck tangles his fingers together and prays that the older man doesn’t say anything else. He usually doesn’t have a problem hiding the fact that he sees ghosts of the murder victims. They don’t talk much to him, they don’t bother him that frequently, and they definitely don’t turn up in the medical examiner’s office to hear what is being discussed about their autopsy or the potential murder weapon. Mark Lee, however, has no issue with doing all of that. He definitely doesn’t have an issue with how Donghyuck keeps seeing him. 

In fact, he seems to quite enjoy it, Donghyuck thinks. What a weird victim. 

“Anyways, as you were saying, you need a man, right. Give me your phone, I’ll install an app on it for you and set up a profile for you.”

“Like I said, hyung, it’s not like that,” Donghyuck hurriedly swipes his phone away before Jungwoo can get his hands on it. “I’m fine being single right now. Really.”

Jungwoo just blinks back at him again, but he merely holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay, what kind of man do you need then?”

Donghyuck stares at the crime scene and autopsy photos littered across Jungwoo’s desk. 

“A man who can give me information that I need.” 

Jungwoo stares back at him. “Illegal information, you mean.” 

Donghyuck lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “Technicalities, definitions, blah blah. Proper channels take too long. It’s going to take Johnny-hyung one whole day to drive back from the city, and he can only get the files we need tomorrow. It’s just a waste of time, don’t you think? The faster we solve this murder, the faster we can go back to our station so that Renjun can stop whining about Jaemin’s coffee addiction going unmonitored in our absence.” 

Jungwoo’s eyebrow twitches up momentarily, but his face remains neutral as he leans back in his chair. He locks his fingers together, ballpoint pen still clutched between them, and his eyes bore into Donghyuck’s head with an intensity that is really starting to get on the detective’s nerves. 

Donghyuck decides in that moment that if Jungwoo really wasn’t so _damn good_ at his fucking job, he really would have wrangled Johnny into getting another medical examiner for their department. However, when it comes to examining evidence and psychoanalysing criminal profiles, Jungwoo’s expertise is undoubtedly the _best_. Johnny repeatedly goes off on random rants on how grateful he is that Jungwoo had chosen to work with them, especially when drunk, pretty much delving into long declarations of love for Jungwoo’s brain and precision with information that pretty much translated into what Renjun termed “Johnny’s work boner for Jungwoo”. Donghyuck himself can’t deny it either; Jungwoo has delivered flawless work and analysis consistently. Every. Single. Time. 

“I’m sure you know someone,” he presses, leaning forward to stare right back at Jungwoo, grinning widely in what Renjun liked to call his “shit-ass-licking face”. God, his partner really has a label for _everything_ , how ridiculous (except maybe with the cute receptionist who has five shots minimum in his coffee daily, but that’s another story for another day, Donghyuck thinks). “Come on now, I know Johnny-hyung was undercover for a top-secret mission for a period of time, before i joined this team at least. And I _know_ for a fact that you were the one who worked on every single piece of evidence that he managed to smuggle out. I’m pretty sure you know who his contacts are, or at least have some idea of. Johnny-hyung’s good, but not _that_ good at cleaning up after himself sometimes. That’s why he has you.” 

Jungwoo’s eyebrow twitches again, but he doesn’t flinch away from Donghyuck’s face which is now very close to his now. Instead, he just folds his lips together, sucks at his teeth for a bit before Donghyuck’s vision is obscured with a large palm and he’s being forced back into his seat on the other side of the medical examiner’s desk. 

“ _Hyung._ ” 

“Donghyuck,” Jungwoo mimics back mockingly, grabbing a post-it stack from the top of his teetering stack of case files with one hand and scrabbling through the bottom drawer of his desk with the other. “Shut up for a bit, I’ll give you your man or whatever you wanna call him.” 

Jungwoo pulls out a notebook, the hardcover worn down from time and the colours faded, the metal rings holding it together spindy and bent out of shape. He thumbs through it one-handed, teeth clamping down on the cap of the ballpoint pen jammed on the end of the writing instrument, and Donghyuck has to clamp down the urge to rip it out of his hand and tell him that biting plastic isn’t the healthiest tick in the world. But he needs Jungwoo’s help, and insulting said medical examiner definitely will not help his case. 

Donghyuck knows he’s pretty good at wrangling information, especially where Jungwoo is involved. Johnny is a bit more secretive and more cautious, a bit more effective in deflecting his questions and comments with his easy smile and a well-placed offer to treat Donghyuck to a new favourite cake at the cafe down from their station. Jungwoo, on the other hands, lacks these walls and distraction tactics; Johnny is the former undercover detective, a police mole placed carefully amongst the mafia, well-versed in deception and deflection. Jungwoo isn’t, and just by that, he’s an easier target when it comes to extracting information that could be counted as, well, less savory. For lack of a better word. Jungwoo is also much more lenient than Johnny, less of a stickler for rules, and Donghyuck isn’t surprised that he has his own connections that are not-so-legal outside of the police, medical and law systems. 

“Here,” Jungwoo tucks his pen behind his ear and rips off the top post-it on the stack, slapping it down in front of Donghyuck with more force than necessary. The tall stack of case files wobbles dangerously, but he ignores it pointedly as he reaches for his mug of tea. “Go to this address at two-fourty-five p.m. tomorrow. Don’t be late, don’t be early. Just go there on the dot. You won’t be able to catch him unless you do. Don’t linger around, don’t lurk. Bring some cash on you or a watch you don’t mind giving up. Make sure it’s worth some good money of course.” 

Donghyuck squints at the medical examiner’s chicken scratch on the pale yellow paper. _26 Gyeongui-ro._ “Who am I looking for, specifically?” 

The corners of Jungwoo’s mouth twitches up, the movement barely visible due to the mug covering half his face. “You’ll know.” 

\-- 

“What if he murders you?” 

Donghyuck has to resist the urge to roll his eyes. It’s not out of character for him, or Renjun to do it at the office. However, he’s not there now. Instead, he’s walking alone down this side street in Gyeongrui-ro, hands stuck in the pockets of his coat, the heavy steel of his firearm pressed against his left palm and a welcome weight on his belt. Mark is just merely floating serenely beside him, his footsteps making no sound on the pavement, but his eyes flickering up and down the empty street behind them. 

Sure, the street is empty, but he’s not taking any chances. The last thing he needs is for someone to see him talking to thin air beside him, and for them to call the police station and report their concern that a police detective appears to be acting weirdly. Small town people are so nosy, they just can’t fucking mind their own business. Like fucking Jung Jaehyun and his obsession with protecting his town. _His_ town, so he says. 

“I don’t think Jungwoo-hyung would set me up to die,” he checks the worn out number on the outside of the house. _Twenty-four_. “I’m pretty sure I won’t get killed. This small town doesn’t need another murder after yours.” 

“This town didn’t need a murder in the first place, but I made it happen,” Mark shrugs wistfully. He skips forward and swings his leg forward in a kick aimed at a pebble in front of them. His foot just passes through the stone, barely a ripple through the translucent lines of his ghostly body, and Mark just frowns as Donghyuck checks his watch and speeds up a bit. God, the houses were so big, too big around here, he thinks. 

Mark catches up to him in no time, his presence sending a mild chill down Donghyuck’s spine that doesn’t really bother the detective that much. It’s something that he got over after seeing ghosts of murder victims for the first time; whenever they stand too close to him there’s an inherent coldness that settles under his bones, a little too close to his heart, and had settled him and made him shifty once upon a time. Now, he’s used to it; the nip of the chill resting under his skin a foreign, but also familiar presence. 

Mark Lee’s a little bit warmer than normal ghosts he meets though, he thinks. He’s also a ghost that lingers around a bit too much compared to other victims, even the young ones. Donghyuck vaguely remembers a child, dressed in his school uniform, spindly limbs tucked into the large fit that he had grown into, staring at Donghyuck with wide black eyes over his body resting on the metal table as his parents cried into their palms, crumpled into each other on the floor of the morgue. Mark Lee kind of reminds him of that kid, except he’s not really a child; he’s an adult that looks like one, one that didn’t have the opportunity to be a child but unfortunately is stuck in the likeliness of his youth, unable to move past the image of his teenage sins of drugs, alcohol and murder. 

The first two are a bit more typical. The last one, well, that’s unique to Mark Lee. 

“Twenty-six, this is it.” 

There’s no house on this listing, just an entire field of unkempt reeds and grass, yellowed out by the sun and lack of care. There is a stone path cutting through the unruly mess of what can be barely called a field, and Donghyuck carefully steps onto it, making sure to keep as quiet as possible. Beside him, Mark steps through the tangled grass easily enough with his lack of materiality, squinting up ahead at what the path leads to. 

“There’s a shrine? I think, up there. And oh. There’s a man.” 

Donghyuck slips a hand inside of his coat, finger automatically coming to rest on the trigger as he carefully makes his way up up the spindly stone path, uneven and jagged, cutting a curved line to the shrine that Mark has mentioned. It is nothing more than a haphazard combination of wood and straw, but it is carefully maintained despite it’s worn-out appearance. There is a man, like Mark has said, dressed in a dark coat with black hair, and his back is to Donghyuck as he kneels in front of the shrine.

“What do you need, detective?” 

Donghyuck blinks. “You know who I am?”

“I only know what I need to know,” the man hasn’t turned around, instead choosing to reach forward and rearrange some of the small items on the shrine altar, tucking a talisman under the candlestick that held a freshly lit candle, white wax dripping slowly down the body. “So, what do you need? What is it that you want to know?” 

“You’re not going to ask who sent me?” 

“I don’t ask for answers that I don’t need to know,” is the lofty answer Donghyuck gets as the man stands up, back still facing Donghyuck. “Spit it out, Senior Detective Lee Donghyuck. What is it that you need?” 

“How do I know if I can trust you?” Donghyuck tightens his grip on his gun, ready to draw it at any unexpected notice. The man doesn’t appear to be armed, he hasn’t noticed any tell-tale bulges that hint at possible weapons on his body. Mark flits back to his side, having floated over to check out the shrine and look at the man’s face for a bit before turning to look at him. 

“He’s not armed, I don’t think the gun’s necessary.” 

Donghyuck ignores him. “Answer the question, sir.” 

The man turns around slowly to face him, his hands holding a black beret in front of him, and Donghyuck nearly stumbles back at the cold passive look in his eyes. He looks horribly out of place in this small town full of people with tanned skin and curved smiles, images of falsity constructed out of a veneer of hospitality towards outsiders, a barricade hiding vindictive jabs and insults that lurk beneath it. This man is pale and sharp, dressed in all black with the exception of a dark blue dress shirt under his white coat, his lips pressed together in an open display of disapproval as he stares impassively down at Donghyuck. His fingers are long and knuckled, almost beautiful, Donghyuck comments stupidly in his head out of reflex, pressed into the soft expensive fabric of his beret, and his belt buckle glints a harsh silver as it catches the slow movement of the afternoon sun high in the sky. 

“There is no need for the gun, detective, I will not hurt you,” the man places his beret on his head, fingers carefully arranging his black fringe curling down to his eyebrows, straight and defined on his sharp face with round doe eyes that are devoid of any emotion but impassiveness. “You came here for something I can provide, so what is it that you need?” 

Out of the corner of his eyes, Mark shrugs and throws a hand in the direction of the mystery man. _You came to look for him, might as well ask._

“I need information about the case involving Mark Lee ten years ago.” 

The man stares at him unflinchingly. “You are a detective, you have access to the system. You didn’t need to come all the way here to interrupt my smoke break to come and ask me that.” 

“I’d hardly call this,” Donghyuck waves to the shrine behind him, “a smoke break. But the information won’t reach us until tomorrow and the systems are so out of date in this small town. The people aren’t very helpful either, I guess it should be expected of this small town.” 

The silence hangs between them for a bit, but Donghyuck refuses to back down. Mark just stares back and forth between the both of them, Donghyuck with his hand still on his gun while the other man stands with his hands tucked in the pockets of his slacks. After what seems to be an awfully long amount of time, the man finally sighs before pulling one hand out of his pocket and gesturing towards the path that Donghyuck had come from. 

“After you, detective.” 

Donghyuck steps back warily, Mark falling into step just behind him, and the unnamed man merely joins him on the cramped path, pulling his coat closer around him. He’s forced to match the other man’s slow, casual step as they amble down the stone path. Mark, on the other hand, merely goes back to attempting to kick at the loose stones falling out of the crevices in the ground, frowning adorably whenever his leg just cuts through the stones without being able to move them at all. 

Yeah, he’s adorable in the same way as babies are, Donghyuck tells himself, discreetly watching the ghost try to nudge a larger stone dislodged from where it had originally been part of the path. Like how normal people find baby pomeranians cute when they are bounding across the floor on their legs that are too short and not fully developed yet. What a jarring image to put to the image of a teenage murderer that had stabbed a younger boy _multiple_ times in cold blood. He’s definitely _not_ cute or Donghyuck’s type or anything. 

“I don’t know who told you what, detective, but let me be clear. I will not deal in information with you. Not directly, by mouth or documents or otherwise. Too risky. You’re too open.” 

Donghyuck turns around to glare at the man standing beside him on the pavement of the empty road. “So you're an useless informant? Wow, so I’ve been on a wild goose chase.”

The man’s mouth curves up in the smallest, slightest smirk, all derison and no humour. “Don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions, dearest detective. It’s for both of our sakes.” 

He’s tugging on sleek black gloves and extending his hand out to Donghyuck before the detective can snap a retort back. “Give me your phone, open it to the keypad.” 

Donghyuck stares at him cautiously, fingers wrapped tight around the precious device known as his smartphone. “You’re not going to hack it or something, are you?” 

The short laugh rings across the empty street, off the plain beige walls of the monochrome houses lined up on the sides. The man sighs, looks up and down the road and clicks his tongue snappily in a way that makes Donghyuck want to punch him. 

“If you don’t trust me, detective, then we have ever met. Good day.” 

Donghyuck inhales deeply before thrusting his phone back in the other man’s face before he can step out onto the road. The other man blinks at him, looking back and forth from Donghyuck’s iphone, open on his keypad, to Donghyuck’s own face before taking the proffered device with careful fingers. Donghyuck watches him tap a number into it quickly, entirely from memory, before his phone is handed back to him and the man’s gloved hands are tucked back into his pressed slacks. 

“Call this number, ask for Ten. Like the number, don’t ask. They will give you instructions on how to find them.” 

“And who do I tell them sent me?” 

The man shifts his weight from one foot to the other before pulling a phone out from his own pocket and tapping at it, gloves still on. “They will know, no one else refers to them by that.” 

“Won’t you at least let me know where to find you again? If I ever need your services again.” 

The man tilts his head back at him, thumbs hovering over the darkened screen of his phone. Privacy tempered screen protector, Donghyuck supposes, popular amongst the police force lest someone accidentally snuck a peak over their shoulder when they were hanging around the crime scenes with their phone camera turned on. _Souvenirs of their own_ , Johnny liked to say, eyes focused on writing things down in his notebook, _they like living off the second-hand thrill of the murders without having to do the dirty work themselves. Better not let them spread any unnecessary information, so it’s better to_ not _be careless_. Clearly this mystery contact Jungwoo somehow has does work that requires utmost discretion as well, especially given how he has had an entire exchange with Donghyuck without saying his own name despite reciting Donghyuck’s full name and position with the clipped precisie pronunciation of a news reporter. 

“I’ll let you know how to find me, Lee Donghyuck,” he answers after a while, phone still in his hands. “I will know when you need me next, even though I hope not to see you again.” 

“And oh, if you could do me a favour, I forgot to leave some offerings at the shrine, and my wallet’s not with me.” 

Donghyuck fingers the bills in his breast pocket, balled tightly up together and held in place with a rubber band. He eases it out, raises it towards the other, feeling like a worshipper standing in front of a shrine of a god holding information that he needs. The man picks it off in between his fingers, the roll disappears into a hidden pocket, and all Donghyuck sees is the dark back of his coat as he walks away from him down the empty alley. 

“Give my regards to John Seo. From DY. See you again, Senior Detective Lee Donghyuck.”

“He’s...interesting. I’ve seen him before.”

Mark reappears at his shoulder, watching as the man, only known as DY, walks smoothly and quickly down the street, a slip of black stark against the pale beige of the streets in this small town. He looks so out of place here, so unlike the bland streets of this small town, the boring setting of a contrastingly gruesome murder with more untied strings than any single one of the people would like to acknowledge. 

“He’s not part of this town?” 

“No,” Mark shrugs, “I’ve seen him here and there, but he doesn’t live here as far as I know. He’s not from here either, but I’ve seen him at Jaehyun’s coffee shop like, once? But he doesn’t appear to know any people in the town. Guess he really comes here for the shrine, then?” 

“Huh,” Donghyuck watches the black slip that is DY round the corner and disappear, vanishing from the insipid backdrop of this dreary town that hated Mark Lee and didn’t love him back. “I wonder what’s his business around here. And his business with Johnny-hyung.” 

Mark wrinkles his nose up at him. “Don’t be nosy, detective. I might be dead, but I know a dangerous man when I see one.” 

Donghyuck stares at the numbers put neatly into the keypad of his phone. “Guess it’s time to call this Ten person. Whoever he is, I hope he is actually useful.” 

\-- 

Turns out Ten is a hacker, and he doesn’t work alone. 

Donghyuck likes his partner enough, a Chinese boy with the name of Yangyang, and is delighted when Yangyang reveals that he’s the same age as him. They bring Donghyuck to their nondescript apartment tucked in the middle of a bustling tower complex, the floor entirely empty and devoid of anything except their plain black apartment hidden behind an equally unassuming door. Mark perches on the bookshelf by the door that contains their computers and their huge screens, eyes wide in fascination as Ten and Yangyang type away on their keyboards and bring up window after window filled with information with each tap of a key. 

“Here you go, the file on the Mark Lee murder from ten years ago.” 

Donghyuck carefully scans the case report in front of him, noting the various initials and persons of note carefully on the screen. “Is there a photo record of the murder weapon?” 

Yangyang hits a few more keys and nods at his screen. “Here you go. Wow, that’s one hell of a knife.” 

The photograph of the knife matches Jungwoo’s description and analysis perfectly, down to the edge of that the examiner had suspected to be sanded down. Donghyuck hurriedly scribbles down the make and the model, shoots a message to Jungwoo about it and reaches for the cash tucked into the lining of his coat. 

“Uh uh,” Ten raises his hand, “no need.” He points down at the curved table supporting their electronic devices, and Donghyuck catches the sight of a familiar roll of notes that had been plucked out of his fingers earlier in the day. Huh, that’s unexpected. 

“So you were expecting me? Even before I called you?” 

Ten smiles up at him as Yangyang unravels the banknotes, the whirring of the computers and printers a soft hum in the background. 

“He just told us to take care of you.” 

\-- 

“If you’re wondering, the knife belonged to Taeyong. It was in his apartment, and it was the closest thing to me at that time, so I guess it became the weapon of my choice.” 

Donghyuck sniffs, dabbing at his nose like he was suffering from a cold. It was a stupid move, he realises belatedly, with the weather being stuffy in the summer, but Mark seems to get the hint. They are seated at a table in the local convenience store, Donghyuck stirring the cup noodles that he had gotten there. Mark is seated opposite him, knees pulled up to his chest, eyes locked on the cup noodles with an expression that bordered on both longing and affection. 

Donghyuck takes a mouthful of noodles. “Don’t talk about murder when I’m eating.”

The ghost ignores his comment pointedly, leaning forward even more and rocking forward, eyes closed as he inhales contentedly. “Mhmm, smells so good. I can’t believe that even though I’m dead, I can still smell food. Man, it’s both a blessing and a disguise.”

Mark lets him eat in silence for approximately two minutes before lurching forward again, eyes wide and eager. “So now that you have the information you need, do you now believe me when I say that Lee Taeyong holds all the answers to my murder?”

“Oh please,” Donghyuck scoffs, lifting the cup to take a large gulp of the soup before setting it back down on the table. He keeps an eye on the student sitting behind the cashier, watches them yawn over the math textbook spread out on the counter before turning back to Mark Lee, who is outwardly eyeing his cup noodles and salivating now. 

“Do you think I can eat, detective?” 

Donghyuck snorts. “I don’t think ghosts need to eat. You can’t even kick a bloody rock.” 

Mark sinks back into his seat with a pout, the long sleeves of his oversized shirts pushed up to his elbows, his eyes still stuck on the cup in Donghyuck’s hand. He looks really young like this, Donghyuck thinks, like a normal university school kid, maybe slightly shorter than average, not looking out of place at all in an empty convenience store close to ten p.m. and looking at cup noodles like they are the love of his life. Donghyuck can definitely relate, except his times in convenience stores were spent on weekends with Renjun, both of them eating cup ramen and melon bread and laughing over stupid vine videos even if they were bone tired from training at the police academy and just wanted to sleep their free time away. 

Mark Lee never had that, Donghyuck realises - an entire experience of what consitutes a normal life swept out from under his feet even before he became a teenage murderer. Instead of late weeknights with beer and ramen, huddled closely with friends under the harsh white lights of the local convenience store, he had spent his teenage years in confinement in a small apartment, his only companions the rumours spread by the townspeople echoing off the walls of his tiny apartment. He never had friends of any sort, shunned by all, stuck in a shabby apartment with the phantom blood of his murder victim seeped into the carpet and stained across the walls. 

He had merely been the victim of malicious rumours before he ran that serrated knife through Lee Jeno. After that, he just became the victim of malicious comments, as his front door became the victim of eggs, rotten vegetables, and slurs sprayed in garish red paint. They had visited his small apartment, Donghyuck and Johnny, earlier during the day before Johnny had to drive back to the city to pick up the relevant files that Donghyuck had conveniently accessed thanks to two very conviving hackers. Mark hadn’t bothered cleaning or fixing his door beyond removing food waste so that it doesn’t stink. The rest of the apartment was bare beyond essentials, a small stove, and a futon shoved hastily against the corner of the tiny studio with messy unmade sheets and a threadbare pillow. It was clean, but stark and plain, completely barren of anything that said even a single thing about Mark Lee, teenage murderer. 

Donghyuck pushes the cup noodles forwards Mark, right in the middle of the table. His ghostly companion looks up at him, eyebrows raised in a silent question. 

“You like the smell right, even if you can’t eat it. Have that one, I’ll get another.” 

As he makes his way to pick out another flavour from the rack before heading to the cashier to pay again, something stirs in Donghyuck’s heart as he watches Mark Lee’s face scrunch up in one of the most sincere, beautiful smiles he has ever seen. 

\-- 

“It’s not a manufacturing error, by the way, about the knife.”

Donghyuck looks up across at Mark, who had long abandoned smelling the cup noodles, instead trying to poke his translucent finger through the cheap plastic instead. He himself had finished with his meal for a while, hunger having gotten the better of him. The student at the cashier had nodded off, face smooshed into the crumpled pages of his textbook. 

“It’s not?” 

Mark slides down, chin coming down to rest on top of his folded arms on the table as he stares up at the detective. “Yeah, it isn’t. I had one of those blades myself, before they started monitoring me after the murder and supplying me with my necessities for a while. No sharp blades or anything hazardous, you know. Teenage murderer, on drugs, hazards, blah blah blah, you know the usual. I had one before I moved in with Taeyong. I don’t know why his particular knife was sanded down like that, but I assumed it was just from wear and tear.” 

“Huh,” Donghyuck stares at the dregs of noodle soup in his cup, brain spinning with this new information. “So it’s unique then, presumably to Taeyong. So why is there another one?” 

Mark shrugs, eyes fixed on a spot on the table, but his mind clearly far away. “Dunno. Like I told you before, you’re the detective, you tell me.” 

Donghyuck blinks down at the table, his vision wavering for a bit. He is too tired, from all the things he had to do today. From dealing with a mysterious man at a shrine and following two hackers into their cleverly disguised apartment hidden on an entire floor, he has been running on pure adrenaline and focus, intent on finding out as much information before Johnny’s return. He’s tired now, the exhaustion seeping into his bones and threatening to drag his eyelids down. 

“Maybe not today, Mark Lee.” 

“Go home. Go to sleep, detective. You’ve worked yourself to the bone today.” 

“Yeah, I will,” Donghyuck decides to hail a cab back to the hotel that they are staying at, the starched sheets suddenly very tempting due to his sleep-addled mind. Too much has happened today, honestly, and he’s honestly grasping for straws trying to piece the scattered pieces of information that he has obtained today and draw some form of relationship figure this whole murder mystery thing out. 

Mark sits beside him on the cab ride back, his translucent hand less than an inch from Donghyuck’s, where it rested on the faux leather of the car seats. The chill under his skin that follows Mark’s presence is comforting now, lulling him towards the edges of sleep as Donghyuck stumbles up into his hotel room with the ghost right on his heels. 

“Sleep now, detective. Thank you for your hard work today.”

The last thing Donghyuck registers before he succumbs to exhaustion on his bed is that the iciness nestling in his veins matches the chill sliding through the strands of his hair. He drops willingly into the embrace of sleep, encouraged by the vaguest traces of spectral fingers pressing against the nape of his neck in the warm humidity of the summer night. 


	3. Chapter 3

“It’s not a manufacturing error, the sanded down edge.”

Johnny raises an eyebrow. “And you know this, how?”

Donghyuck keeps his eyes on the blade encased in the plastic of the evidence bag, watching as Jungwoo raises it to the harsh light to examine the edge. “I don’t know, just an intuition I guess.” He doesn’t miss the look that the medical examiner throws his way.

“Huh,” Johnny offers, shoulder shoved against the wall as he watches Jungwoo do whatever he’s supposed to do. The bags under his eyes are ridiculous, probably a result of not sleeping well and driving back and forth from the city to this small town. Mark, who has chosen to curl up on one of the many spare chairs in Jungwoo’s lab today, is watching the detective sergeant with wide eyes as he heaves a box of evidence onto Jungwoo’s table.

“That's _not_ a lot of evidence,” Jungwoo manages, lethal blade, otherwise known as Mark Lee’s weapon of choice, held gingerly in between his fingers.

“It’s a pretty open-and-shut case, when they caught the culprit at the scene,” Johnny flips open the box and pulls out a photo of Mark Lee. He’s younger, obviously, cheeks hallowed but still round with baby fat that puberty had not managed to get rid off during that time. He’s staring at the camera with such a haunted, empty expression, that it sends chills down Donghyuck’s spine. He sneaks a glance at the ghost of said boy, sitting so innocently in a corner and watching everything unfold before him like he had front seats to the premier screening of an Oscar-winning film.

Except that film is his very life. What a weirdo, Donghyuck thinks. Okay, maybe he needs to find another word to replace ‘weirdo’. But if the shoe fits, why bother, right?

“We need to start interviewing suspects,” Renjun mutters, sifting through the files in the dusty old box. Johnny drops the old photograph of Mark onto the table and Donghyuck watches it flutter down onto Jungwoo’s cluttered desk, yellowed with age.

Johnny nods, slumping into a chair beside Jungwoo’s desk and closing his eyes. “Yeah, I’ve gotten Jisung to call up the witness who reported the crime and some other people who are quite closely connected to the original Mark Lee murder ten years ago. Can both of you go sort out the schedules and make sure that they all come in and are interviewed separately?”

“Yes, of course, hyung,” Donghyuck reaches across to pat Johnny’s thigh affectionately. “Get some sleep, honestly. Driving back and forth from the city back to here definitely has not done you and your fucked-up sleep schedule any favours.”

His boss just nods numbly, arm thrown over his eyes, and Donghyuck sneaks another look at the chair against the wall. It is empty, and Mark Lee is nowhere to be seen.

\--

Donghyuck finds himself face-to-face with Jung Jaehyun again. Handsome, smiley, but still as infuriating as ever as he stares serenely back at Donghyuck over the cup of lukewarm coffee in his hands.

“I should offer to sponsor the police station with some good coffee, given their hard work,” he doesn’t break eye contact as he takes a careful sip out of the mug. “I don’t understand how you drink this horrible swill. Maybe I should have asked for water.”

“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it, Mr. Jung,” Donghyuck replies calmly, tamping his temper down as he shuffles through the papers in front of him. He’s still pretty sure that Jung Jaehyun is guilty somehow, call it investigator’s gut or whatever, but this man sitting in a pretty beige button-up with sleek slacks and shoes that are _quite_ expensive before him is definitely at least involved in this whole fiasco of a murder. Or the one ten years back.

Jaehyun smiles, the uplifted corners of his mouth not matching the cold distant look in his eyes. “It’s fine, detective. I will drink it. Ask away.”

Donghyuck stares. What a weird man. The stirring in his gut doesn’t go away.

“So, what time did you say that you found the body again?”

“Six-forty p.m.,” Jaehyun drums his fingers against the side of the cheap plastic cup. “I was out running, so I checked my smartwatch. I was running past the park when I realised that there was a body placed right in the middle of the basketball court. I used my smartwatch to make the call to 112, which is why I was aware of the exact timing of which when I stumbled upon it.”

Donghyuck taps his pen on the scratchy lined paper. “And you didn’t try to check his pulse or anything?”

Jaehyun lifts one perfectly manicured eyebrow. “Why would I? He was already dead when I found him.”

Now _that_ doesn’t sound right. “How were you so sure?”

Jung Jaehyun doesn’t blink as he lifts the cup of disgustingly lukewarm coffee to his mouth. “I’m no detective like you, but I’m pretty sure I can recognise a dead body when I see one. He was dead when I found him. I’m sure of that.”

Donghyuck blinks. Well, that response was a little bit _too_ sure, but the man was certainly not going to move on that. Maybe it was time to pursue another line of questioning, perhaps one more loosely related to this murder.

“Do you think this murder is related to the murder ten years ago?”

Jaehyun stares back at him unblinkingly over the rim of the coffee cup. “What do _you_ think, detective?”

There is an irritation that creeps up Donghyuck’s throat and threatens to spit out on his tongue in the form of barbed insults. He stares at the corner of the drab grey walls and counts to ten in his head, an exercise that Johnny had drilled into him and Renjun when they had been Junior Detectives still under training. They both had short tempers and tended to get riled up easily with difficult suspects, Renjun more than him, but Donghyuck has come to realise that if all suspects were easy to deal with, they wouldn’t be considered suspects at all. So he just stares at the wall, counts to ten, and thinks about sleeping in his own bed back in his apartment after this whole case blows over and Mark Lee can finally stop bothering him.

Oh, huh, after he catches this murderer, Mark Lee will disappear. Just like all the ghosts of the victims that he has encountered before. Donghyuck doesn’t know why it’s bothering him so much; he usually feels glad to send them off, glad that they no longer have to haunt the earth because they are so troubled by the lack of clarity with regard to their deaths.

He inhales deeply and looks back up at Jung Jaehyun. “I’m asking the questions here, Mr Jung. If you aren’t being cooperative, this process will take much longer than both of us will like.”

Jaehyun just smiles tightly back, his eyes cold and guarded.

\--

“Detectives, can I just be frank about something?”

Donghyuck stills in his tracks, Renjun right beside him. His partner had just finished interviewing Nakamoto Yuta, who owns the bookstore near the basketball court where the body had been discovered. Yuta is shrugging on his jacket, standing just half a step behind Jaehyun, whose coat is still slung over his arm. He turns around, unsure of what to say in response, but Renjun beats him to it.

“Do you mean you weren’t frank about your answers during the questioning? If so, that’s going to be quite a problem, Mr Jung.”

“Oh come on, Detective Huang. It’s not like that,” Jaehyun smiles lightly, the flat line of his lips just barely a curve. Behind him, Yuta is staring coldly at him and Renjun, the distrust written all over his face as he reaches out to put a hand on Jaehyun’s shoulder.

“It’s nothing to do with the facts of the murder, Detectives,” Jaehyun crosses his arms and turns to face both of them fully. “This town has been plagued with nothing but horror and fear ever since Mark Lee committed that unspeakable murder ten years ago. Now that he is, well, for lack of a better word, _gone_ \- that’s something that has been settled once and for all. The town can finally breathe again, without worrying about a murderer walking amongst them and being constantly plagued by the possibility that he might snap and relapse.”

Donghyuck tightens his grip on the folders. “I don’t understand what you are trying to say, Mr Jung.”

Jung Jaehyun tilts his head to the side and carefully rolls his head, chin raised in a subtle challenge that Donghyuck clearly reads. “What I mean, detective, is that maybe there is no point to solving a murder. Some victims don’t need justice, especially those that have been criminals themselves. This murder has actually put the town at ease, not caused more distress unlike the one that happened ten years ago. Some might even say, justice has _finally_ been served.”

Mark Lee is sitting in one of the chairs in the visiting area, feet pulled up on the seat with his fingers clasped around his knees. He’s staring at Jung Jaehyun with an unreadable expression on his face, eyes wide and round, before he turns around to look out into the dark night outside of the sliding doors of the local police station. Donghyuck swallows down an irritated sigh, reaches behind him to tap Renjun’s wrist gently as a silent signal. _Let me talk, I’ll take care of this. Don’t worry._

“I am not from this town, Mr Jung,” the words are like stones on his tongue, difficult to get out, and even more difficult to be calm when speaking them. “I was called in with my team to investigate a murder, and it is my job as a detective to find out who is the guilty perpetrator behind this gruesome murder. You, and the rest of this small town might have residual feelings of resentment for Mark Lee, but I am not one of you. I am here to do my job, and my team is the same. You might think that this murder should just be closed, but unfortunately, I cannot agree with that. We did not drive all the way out here just to dismiss a case and close a file.”

Jaehyun doesn’t respond. His lips are pressed together in a flat line, his dimples completely vanished as he regards Donghyuck with the cold hostility that had been hidden underneath the previous veneer of false smiles and feigned friendliness. His companion, Yuta, merely squeezes his shoulder before tugging up the collar of his coat.

“Well then, I wish you all the best in your efforts, detectives. Do let us know if you need anything else from us.”

Donghyuck bows stiffly, eyes still locked on the frigid expression glazed over on Jung Jaehyun’s face. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr Jung, Mr Nakamoto. We will be in touch.”

Once the door closes behind them, Renjun sniffs loudly in contempt before tugging the files from Donghyuck’s arms. “They are so difficult to deal with, honestly. Nakamoto just spent like twenty minutes staring at me like it was a contest and took forever to answer my questions. He just said that around five thirty, there was a small man, dressed in all black, who walked past his shop lugging a large suitcase. Kept insisting that it was dark, so he couldn’t see any details. How helpful is _that_?”

Donghyuck sighs. “No security cameras either, I’m guessing.”

“Nope,” Renjun is clearly irritated, given how they were surviving on four hours of of sleep and had spent nearly six hours going through all the evidence from the murder ten years ago before conducting these two very difficult interviews with two very difficult witnesses. “Said that there was no need to, since he pretty much lives in the shop and that it’s a small town. No one steals around here, apparently. Not even the high school kids. Apparently Mark Lee is the only ‘aberration’ that has been plaguing this town.”

“And now he’s gone.” Except he’s not really. He’s still in his chosen seat, staring out at the spot where Yuta and Jaehyun had hailed a cab and left. Donghyuck heaves another sigh before reaching out to clap his partner on his bicep. “I need to make a call, Injunnie. Can you take the files back to the office and update Johnny-hyung? I’ll be there shortly.”

Renjun raises an eyebrow. “Calling your sister?”

Donghyuck doesn’t mention that he actually doesn’t do that. His sister is busy in Europe, gallivanting around with boys and taking pictures for her Instagram for brand deals. He doesn’t like to call, neither does she, but Renjun doesn’t know that and it makes for a convenient excuse. He nods, and pulls out his phone, making a show of tapping the screen aggressively and pulling up his contacts.

“See you back in the office,” Renjun slaps his side with the files and leaves, the clack of his dress shoes echoing loudly in the empty hall of the visitors’ waiting area. Donghyuck slides over to the seat occupied by Mark Lee, careful to keep his eyes on his phone as he watches Renjun close the door leading to the office behind him before he speaks.

“Hey, there’s no need to dwell so much on Jung’s words. He’s just being an ass.”

Mark blinks a few times before swiveling his head around to look at Donghyuck.

“He’s right though, some victims don’t need justice. Especially not victims that were murderers before they were victims,” Mark stares back at him. “Maybe it’s better that I don’t know who killed me, maybe I should move on instead of lingering around. It’s just causing a lot of trouble for you and your team in general, maybe you should just close this case and go back to the city. I’m sure there are more urgent cases that need your attention.”

“Mark.”

With his black hair falling across his forehead, cheekbones high and prominent from lack of nutrition, his ghostly presence making the paleness of his skin shine with a certain degree of see-thoroughness, Mark Lee is still attractive under the ghastly fluorescent lights of the police station. Maybe, if he had grown up in a normal family, a family that gave him the love that every child deserves and provided him with a future filled with endless possibilities, he wouldn’t be sitting in front of Donghyuck, invisible to everyone else but him, his body scarred and naked under a sheet in the morgue after being opened up and closed back together again.

It could have happened to anyone, even to Donghyuck, but it happened to Mark Lee. Unfortunate, but that’s how reality is. So Donghyuck turns his hand up and spreads his palm open before looking up at the ghost of the murder victim, the ghost of a murderer in front of him.

“Put your hand over mine.”

Mark stares back at him. “I don’t understand.”

Donghyuck nods towards his open palm. “I can’t touch you, but I can feel your presence, you know. Put your hand on top of mine.”

Mark blinks, stares at Donghyuck’s hand set on top of his knee for a bit before he reaches out cautiously. He settles his translucent palm on top of Donghyuck’s, lower lip trapped between his teeth, and Donghyuck feels the chill of the ghostly limb press against his skin before it slides under and makes itself at home under his fingertips. He gently curves his fingers up, settles the pads of his fingers on top of where Mark’s knuckles are, and gently squeezes the phantom appendage in an attempt at reassurance, maybe one of comfort.

“I’ll find your murderer, Mark Lee. You heard me, I don’t have any attachment to this town. I am here to do my job as a detective, and I know I probably don’t look like it to you, but I am pretty damn good at my job. It is my responsibility, my duty to find out who did this to you. To help you find answers so that you can at least get some form of justice, even if you cannot benefit from it anymore. Every victim deserves answers, honestly, especially those who really have no idea what happened to them before life was stolen from them so cruelly.”

Mark shifts in his seat, the phantom sounds of his clothes whispering in Donghyuck’s ears. “Maybe not every single victim deserves justice, detective. Some of us have done worse things, like commit murder on innocent victims ourselves.”

Donghyuck shakes his head. “Maybe you might think that, and maybe it is true. Maybe serial killers, rapists, abusers, don’t deserve justice when they are killed. But you’re neither of that. You were just someone who made a bad decision, fueled by a bad drug habit, perhaps, that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve justice for your own murder. Someone out there plotted this, took your life, and proceeded to take out their own pent up feelings on your chest. There is someone out there, someone guilty, driven by anger, who decided to play god and judge while ignoring the systems of law and justice. They took things into their own hands, and they will have to pay the price for it.”

Mark Lee’s eyes are wet, glittering with unshed tears that would never stain anything even if they fell, bright under the harsh white lights of the empty waiting area. He takes a deep shuddering breath, and Donghyuck feels the coldness wrap around his hand tighter as Mark tucks his chin towards his chest while his hair swings forward to hide his face.

“You deserve justice, Mark Lee,” Donghyuck doesn’t know why he’s saying this. He has never said it to any other victim, or any other ghost that he has encountered before. There’s a first for everything, he supposes; he has never met a victim like Mark Lee after all. “Even if you think you don’t. Someone out there is guilty of kidnapping and murdering you, guilty of taking justice into their own hands and acting above the law. Those are the facts.”

There is still nothing underneath his fingertips, but Donghyuck squeezes it gently anyway, ignoring how his fingers sink through the faint ghostly outline of Mark’s knuckles.

“I _will_ find whoever murdered you, Mark Lee. I’ll do my job as a detective, and I will get the answers and the justice that you deserve. I promise you this.”

Mark looks up from under his fringe, eyes red from tears that aren’t actually wet, his nose scrunching up with sniffles that do not echo across the empty smooth floors of the police station. There is no proof of his existence, except to Donghyuck’s eyes, and the coldess that has made itself at home underneath Donghyuck’s skin. He smiles softly at Donghyuck, the action a mere slight curve of his pale lips, but it is the most sincere smile that the detective has ever seen on his face. Mark Lee is somewhere between a boy and a man, forced to grow up too fast due to the people that left him alone, dragged into a world that forced him to become something he was not. He never had an opportunity to live a normal childhood, never had the chance to grow into an ordinary adult; in the first place, he never got to have a say in how his life went.

Mark Lee is a ghost haunted by the demons of his own life, lurking around in the shadows and existing in the whispers exchanged by the residents that lived around him. He never had someone who truly wanted to do something for him, Donghyuck had realised. He never believed that he genuinely deserved good things, gentle words, or kind deeds for himself. His own death is karmic justice, for the murder that he had committed under the influence of drugs ten years ago, a price to pay for the distress and peril that he had struck into the core of this small town.

But Donghyuck doesn’t believe that. He’s a victim, regardless of the circumstances. A victim of bad decisions and repeated abandonment, a victim of cruel words thrown like striking stones from the ones who stood behind the line and hurled them relentlessly while covering their faces. Mark Lee had never gotten answers that he deserved, like why his parents abandoned him or why the rumours about him started in the first place.

Donghyuck can’t give him all the answers that he thinks Mark should have, but he wants to at least give him one - the answer of who murdered him and left his body on the basketball court.

“Thank you, detective,” Mark’s eyes are bright, his lips are soft, and Donghyuck wants to kiss him and tell him that it’s going to be alright. But detectives don’t kiss people they are investigating, much less ghosts of murder victims they are trying to find justice for. _Don’t make any promises to anybody, especially not the victims’ family_ , he remembers Johnny telling them firmly. _Sometimes, murders cannot be solved and cases go cold. It’s not within our means, and we cannot control what evidence we can or cannot find. So, don’t make promises. Not to yourself, especially not to those who wants justice for the victims_.

No one wants justice for Mark Lee. Johnny has never said anything about promises made to the victims, to those already dead. Loophole, Donghyuck guesses. But he has never made promises to any of the ghosts he’s encountered before. Again, he has never met anyone like Mark Lee, ghost or not. Mark Lee is an exception to the many things he has encountered before.

Exceptions, Donghyuck thinks, are for those who don’t fit into any of the expected frameworks. Mark Lee is the definition of not fitting into any definition, any stereotype, or any existing framework. One promise doesn’t change anything.

It definitely doesn’t change that Mark Lee is already dead.

Donghyuck inhales, smiles shakily back at Mark. “Okay, now I actually need to make a call.”

Mark raises his eyebrows. “So, you actually have to call your sister?”

“Oh, please,” Donghyuck fishes his phone out of his pocket and lets go of Mark’s semi-transparent hand. The chill still lingers, both under his skin and on top of it, and he tries not to notice how Mark cradles the abandoned hand to his chest with something like wonder in his eyes. “Like she will pick up my calls, right. No, I’m calling Ten.”

“Ten? What do you need him for?”

Donghyuck presses his phone to his ear and tips his head back to rest it against the edge of the seat. “I need to meet DY again.”

\--

“I need someone of a certain...expertise.”

DY doesn’t look up from where he’s nursing a glass of whiskey on the rocks. The small pub, tucked away in the corner of a street right on the edge of this horrid tiny town, is empty. All the chairs are stacked up neatly on the tables, the floor polished and clean. The only other person in this shoebox of a space is the bartender, who is wiping down the counter without so much of a glance towards the corner where Donghyuck is standing in front of the seated man.

“And you came to me again,” DY takes a mouthful of whiskey, eyes locked on the novel open on the table before him. “A bad habit, detective. Don’t get addicted to drugs, they will just bleed you open and before you know it, you’re halfway in the gutter to your own death.”

Donghyuck raises an eyebrow. “Speaking from experience, DY?”

DY frowns. “Don’t call me that, and no. Drugs are _ew_. Never got the appeal of snorting cocaine up your nose. I have other addictions, and they don’t ruin my life.”

“So what do I call you?”

“Don’t call me anything,” DY shrugs, still not looking up from his book. “It’s better for me and for you, Senior Detective Lee Donghyuck.”

Donghyuck shoves his hands into his pocket and counts to five before unfurling his fists. DY turns a page, swirls the ice in his glass around. The gentle clink of the ice cubes against glass echoes softly off the polished floors of the miniscule bar, hidden behind an unlabeled door with a silver handle. Donghyuck counts back down to one in his head, and DY takes another sip of his drink before speaking again.

“So, what kind of expertise do you need this time?”

 _Finally_ , Donghyuck thinks. “I need someone who has eyes and ears everywhere, someone who can get me information on the words and information being passed around this town.”

DY hums. “Maybe I do know someone like that.”

Donghyuck tips his head forward in a bow. “I was hoping that you would.”

The page rustles softly as DY flips it over with his slender fingers, and the condensation on the outside of his whiskey glass is shiny under the yellow lights of the pub. “And where is this location that you want to get said words and information on?”

“Takoyaki Bookshop.”

DY nods at his novel. “Nakamoto Yuta, interesting. Alright, I will get the man you need there tomorrow. Meet him at the convenience store on the same road five minutes to nine.”

Donghyuck stares at the circle of water formed on top of the coaster. “You’re not telling me what to look out for, again?”

DY laughs, and the sound reminds Donghyuck of sharp edges of broken glass, jagged from where it has split apart due to impact, more than one razor edge hidden beneath the deceiving curve of a blunt fringe.

“Like I said the first time, detective, they will know.”

That’s the most he will get from this mysterious man, Donghyuck supposes. DY is dressed just like a normal office worker, collar unbuttoned, tie undone and loose, coat folded nearly on the cushioned lounge seat beside him. He looks just like an ordinary man who is nursing a drink after a long day of work, but Donghyuck knows he’s definitely anything but _that_. DY turns another page of his novel, takes another sip of his whiskey, and still doesn’t lift his head. Donghyuck sighs and reaches for another bundle of bills, held together tightly with a rubber band nicked off Jungwoo’s table, tucked carefully into the hidden pocket he had sewn into the collar of his coat.

“You can give it to him,” DY jerks his head in the direction of the bar, eyes still following the lines on paper closely as he rubs a thumb absentmindedly into the water gathered on the outside of his glass. “He will appreciate it. Good day, detective.”

It is pitch black outside, and Donghyuck really needs to sleep if he’s going to be prowling around Nakamoto Yuta’s bookstore waiting for someone that he has never met before in the morning. He tips his head forward in another nod, DY raises his drink in the faintest notion hinting at an acknowledgement before he puts his mouth to the rim and tips the glass back.

He places the tight roll of banknotes on the counter carefully on his way out. The bartender smiles up at him, black fringe cropped short over his forehead and dips into a bow as Donghyuck turns towards the door.

“Thank you for your patronage at WinWin’s. Hope to see you again soon!”

\--

“This DY person sure knows a lot of people, huh.”

Mark is lingering over Donghyuck’s shoulder as the detective stares down his choices of triangle _gimbap_ arranged neatly on the cooler before him. Tuna, teriyaki chicken, salmon tartar. Huh, Donghyuck neither loves or hates any of them, but his stomach is growling because he had left before the hotel cafeteria had opened for breakfast. Donghyuck needs food in his stomach, caffeine in his system, and hopefully a working mind before DY’s promised man shows up on time in this convenience store two numbers down from Nakamoto Yuta’s bookstore.

“It’s his job, I presume,” he snatches the teriyaki chicken off the cooler and turns towards the fridge to pick out a coffee. Huh, they even have the ones with the BTS faces on them here. Guess small towns aren’t exempt from whatever K-pop fad that is taking over the entire world either. Donghyuck just picks out a plain can, checks that it is a cold brew with no milk, no sugar, and decides to grab the salmon tartar as well as he heads towards the counter.

Mark hums, and Donghyuck can see his eyes lingering on the strawberry shortcake sitting in the section of the cooler labeled ‘dessert’. “I don’t think he’s a bad person though. I just think he’s very dangerous. Like, ‘can ruin your entire life without lifting a finger or killing you’ kind of dangerous. I wouldn’t want to fuck with him, or anyone that works with him for that matter.”

Donghyuck is tempted to reply snarkily with _you’re dead_ , but decides to hold his tongue as he approaches the cashier and the worker looks up from her phone with a smile. He drops his items onto the counter and fumbles around for his wallet in his back pocket as the beeping of the scanner rings in the empty convenience store.

“That will be four thousand won sir. Cash or credit?”

“Cash. Oh, and can you add one pack of Dunhill Frost to this as well?”

Donghyuck turns to his right, and a man with dark blue hair dressed in a sharply pressed suit smiles at him before handing the exact amount of cash across the counter.

\--

His name is Kun, and like Ten, he refuses to tell Donghyuck DY’s real name.

“Ten’s not his real name either, just so you know,” he tells Donghyuck casually as he flicks his lighter behind the tinted windows of the back of his van. It had been impressively remodeled and reconstructed into a miniature surveillance room, everything black and nondescript. It reminds Donghyuck of Ten and Yangyang’s room, and also of DY’s existence in general. Huh, maybe it was a chosen aesthetic that they had agreed on, but Donghyuck’s not even sure if he can call them friends in the first place. Mark has chosen to sit on one of the stools in front of the monitors built into the side of the van, eyes wide and curious as Kun checks his appearance in a mirror with a smoking cigarette tucked in between his teeth.

“Is your real name Kun then?”

Kun smiles back at him and slings a bag over his head so that the strap rests across his chest. “Now where’s the fun if I told you the answer to that, hm?”

Donghyuck rolls his eyes openly this time, and Mark giggles into his palm. He pretends not to notice as he peels back the plastic wrapper of the teriyaki chicken _gimbap_ and takes a big bite.

“Want one?” He offers the salmon tartar to Kun, who only shakes his head and blows out another stream of smoke.

“Oh, I’ll take the coffee, if you don’t mind.”

\--

Nakamoto Yuta is honestly quite handsome, if Donghyuck was being honest with himself and his impeccable gay judgement. He watches the bookstore owner arrange some newspapers and books outside, his long brown hair curling softly over his ears and barely brushing the tops of his shoulders. He smiles at a group of women jogging past him, hands a newspaper to an elderly man shuffling past, and even gives some gummies to some kids on their way to school. They run towards him, let him pick them up and loudly call him “Yuta-nii” with the widest smiles as he ruffles their hair and presses kisses to their round cheeks.

He waits until the streets are cleared, swallowing down the last of rice and seaweed in his mouth as he watches Yuta put some signs into a basket and wipe down the space that they had previously occupied. Donghyuck steps carefully onto the streets, crumpling the plastic of the _gimbap_ wrapper loudly to make his presence known as he approaches the bookshop, his other hand reaching for his badge tucked away in his blazer. He watches unflinchingly as Yuta’s head snaps out and his eyes lock on him, widening briefly in recognition before he nods in greeting. Donghyuck dumps his trash in a nearby bin, wipes his mouth, and quickens his pace until he’s standing in front of Yuta with his badge out.

“Mr Nakamoto, I’m Senior Detective Lee Donghyuck. My partner Detective Huang interviewed you the other day for your witness statement. Are you free to talk for a bit? It’s nothing much.”

Yuta’s eyes dart warily up and down the street for a bit, his hands tightening on the handles of the basket holding the signs. He snaps his gaze back to Donghyuck’s face, a muscle in his jaw just twitches barely before his face stretches up in a bright smile.

“Yes, of course. What is it, Detective Lee? I’m happy to help.”

Donghyuck smiles shortly back at him before pocketing his badge and reaching for his notebook and pen. Behind Yuta, Mark is scanning the books laid out for sale with mild interest etched into his face. He turns to a blank page, clicks his pens and looks the bookstore owner in the eye.

“So, according to your witness statement, you said that you saw a small man dressed in all black lugging a large suitcase past your store at about four p.m.? The suitcase was black in colour, was it?”

“Yes,” Yuta heaves his basket under one arm, stretches out with the opposite hand to grab the rag and the sanitising spray on the table. He dumps them back into the basket, wipes his hand on his apron. “It was quite big, I recall. I told Detective Huang it was probably one of the largest sizes possible, twenty eight to thirty inches, I believe. The person carrying it looked like he was having a hard time even though he was using the wheels to pull it along. Dunno, the body might have been inside or something?”

“Right,” Donghyuck pretends to scribble something down in his notebook, finds himself writing random names instead. _DY_. _Daeyeol, Doyoon, Daeyoo, Dooyeol?_ “Do you think you would be able to identify the suitcase if we found it and brought it in front of you?”

Yuta shrugs, his eyes sliding off Donghyuck’s face and darting around the stacks of books placed neatly on the table beside them. “Dunno, it looked pretty generic for sure. It was quite dim too, that day. It was quite cloudy, thought it was going to rain, so I was inside packing up the books that are usually displayed here.”

Donghyuck scribbles down another name, pretending that he was taking down notes while listening to the other man. _Dong Yoo?_ Sounds awfully like the name of some famous actor that Jaemin the receptionist likes to go on and on about.

“Mr Nakamoto,” he waits for Yuta to look back at him before he chooses his words, running over the bare script that Kun had drilled into his head while he was chugging Donghyuck’s coffee in the tiny surveillance van. “We interviewed a couple of witnesses besides you and Mr Jung, people who work around this area and frequent it. There have been several witness reports stating that instead of a small man dressed in all black, they instead saw a tall man, around one hundred and eighty centimeters, give or take. Dressed in all black, with a large suitcase, like you said. It kind of contradicts your testimonial, no?”

Yuta blinks, and there is it again, that tick, the barest tightening of a muscle in a jaw before he opens his mouth to reply. “Maybe I was mistaken. I was looking from inside of the shop after all.”

Donghyuck smiles at him genially, watching as Mark Lee reads the headline of today’s newspaper with his mouth pursed in concentration just behind Yuta. “Would you like to make any amendments to your witness testimonial then? About the appearance of the man?”

“No,” Yuta’s response is curt, and his jaw is obviously tense despite the smile on his face. “I will stick with what I said, Detective. Thank you for your offer, and the information though.”

Donghyuck nods in acknowledgement, tucking his pen and notebook back into his blazer before shoving his hands in his pocket. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a familiar shock of blue hair and black square sunglasses, black wired earphones tucked snugly in Kun’s ears as he steps up to the front of the bookstore and pushes the door open. There is a sharp jangle of the chimes signaling his entrance, and Yuta’s head snaps towards him as Kun makes his way to the aisle with cookbooks. The one right in front of the counter with the cashier and the landline.

“I’ll let you get back to work then. Thank you for your time, Mr Nakamoto.”

Yuta just nods stiffly, hitches the basket up under his arm before turning to enter the shop himself. Donghyuck watches the chime above the door shakes with his entrance into the shop before he turns around, barely catching the way that Kun is studying a cookbook with faux interest in the aisle as he heads back to the black van parked four units down. _Vegan Recipes for The Lazy._ Interesting choice, he supposes.

“Now we wait?” Mark chirps in his ear as Donghyuck steps into the convenience store again, making a beeline for the fridge to grab another coffee. He hesitates before the dessert section for a grand total of five seconds before he picks up the strawberry shortcake, ignoring the stutter of his heart when Mark’s eyes light up at his choice.

“Yeah,” he murmurs softly as he heads to the cashier, offering the worker a small smile while he pulls his wallet out from his back pocket. “Now we wait.”

\--

Fifteen minutes later, Kun slides back into the van, yanking out his earphones and pushing his sunglasses up onto his head. He smiles at Donghyuck in greeting before tapping the bag slung at his side.

“So did he make a call?”

“Yep, just like I predicted,” Kun lights up another cigarette before carefully dismantling a smaller pocket on the side of the mysterious bag. Donghyuck catches the flash of one very tiny camera lens embedded into the side of the bag as it hits the light. Kun yanks out a small flash drive and boots up the surveillance system in front of them before plugging it into an outlet. Mark leans forward with round eyes, mouth agape in wonder, as Kun taps a few keys and brings a video showing Nakamoto Yuta on the phone onto the screen.

_“I think the police know something. One of the detectives showed up outside my bookstore. Said something about my testimonial contradicting other witness statements and asked if I would like to rephrase things.”_

Yuta’s face is twisted in distress, laced with an inherent sort of panic as he taps the counter with a finger. He listens to whoever is on the other side of the line intently, his brows furrowed tightly together.

_“No, I think it’s best if we meet, to confirm things. I’m sure they will go once they realise that it’s pretty much a cold case.”_

Yuta sighs, his teeth digging into his lower lip as his eyes dart up to look outside the window, probably checking to see if Donghyuck was already gone at that time. _“No, liste- no. It’s not like that. I just think it’s better to double check, you know. Make sure our stories don’t clash.”_

There’s a few more minutes of silence as Yuta hangs his head, phone still pressed to his ear before he starts arranging the post-it stacks scattered across the table by colour.

_“Alright, see you later tonight at nine then. Community hall.”_

That is the last bit of audio caught on the tape before Yuta hangs up. Kun stops the video, taps the ash off his cigarette into the tray before bringing it to his lips. Donghyuck stares at the frozen video on the screen, realisation pooling in his gut as he realises that his gut feeling was right. This is not just a one-man-murder, or at least, the entire orchestration of this was not done purely by just one single individual’s effort.

“Who was he calling?”

Kun lifts a shoulder in response. “That’s not my expertise. This is when you look for Ten.”

\--

“This is oh so very interesting,” Yangyang comments blandly while Ten’s keyboard clacks noisily with the rapid flicker of multiple windows and codes running across the screen.

Donghyuck tears his eyes away from Ten’s screen to look at the younger hacker who is bouncing a small soft ball against the low ceiling. “What’s so interesting?”

“This entire murder,’ Yangyang catches the ball and snaps his wrist, hurling it towards Donghyuck who catches it out of reflex. The hacker whistles, grinning as the detective lobs the ball back at him and resuming his earlier action. “The murder of someone who murdered someone. Sounds like a Murakami book, or a Keigo Higashino. I know DY loves those.”

“Yangyang,” Ten chatises, never taking his eyes off the screen.

“Right, he’s not one of us,” Yangyang snaps his mouth shut and mimes zipping his lips close. Donghyuck rolls his eyes while Mark giggles, perched from his usual spot on the bookshelf, filled with Japanese manga in Chinese and random books written in Thai. Ten taps one final key loudly before snapping his fingers in Donghyuck’s direction.

“Here you go, Nakamoto’s phone records. Looks like the last call he made was to the coffee shop Jung Jaehyun owns.”

 _Jung Jaehyun_. So his gut feeling was right. The coffee shop owner with his bright cold eyes and empty smile _is_ involved. He checks his watch. Seven forty-five. Just about under an hour before Yuta is supposed to meet Jaehyun at the community hall. He turns to Yangyang, who has set down the ball and is instead flicking through a window filled with code lazily.

“Can you get me everything on Jung Jaehyun? Like, _everything_.”

Yangyang cracks his knuckles and grins up at Donghyuck. “Is that a challenge or what?”

Ten reaches out and slaps the younger hacker across the head without even looking, pulling out a new window with his fingers flying across the keyboard. “Less bragging, more typing.”

Donghyuck watches as Jung Jaehyun’s life in pictures, words and Facebook posts fill up the four screens in front of him rapidly. There are lots and lots of pictures with Lee Taeyong, Lee Jeno and Nakamoto Yuta, he realises. In school uniforms, in casual clothes, shirtless on a beach with beers in their hands. In almost every single photo, Lee Taeyong is always tucked under Jaehyun’s arm, or into his side, and Jaehyun’s smile in every single photo is genuine and wide. His cheeks puffed up with the emotion stretching his face, eyes crinkled up into crescents with his arm wrapped around Lee Taeyong’s waist as they both held up their graduation certificates to the camera, the glare of the sun catching a band on Jaehyun’s ring finger.

Donghyuck blinks. “Wait, can I see that picture?”

Yangyang clicks his mouse and the full picture appears on the screen closest to Donghyuck in all of its high definition glory. Donghyuck peers closely at Jaehyun’s right hand.

“Zoom in on their hands.”

The pieces are coming together in Donghyuck’s mind, slowly but surely. Jaehyun’s forced smile in the cafe, his face stone cold as he held Donghyuck’s gaze and stood stiffly in the waiting area of the police station.

 _Some might even say, justice has_ finally _been served_.

He turns to Ten, who is still tapping away on his keyboard. “Look for any records of Jung Jaehyun in the Registry of Marriages.”

It takes Ten less than a minute to crawl through all the data in the Registry before a document appears on the screen next to the photo of Jaehyun and Taeyong on their graduation day. Donghyuck inhales deeply, and the image of a familiar knife handle with the edge sanded down delicately flashes before his eyes, sitting innocently among other utensils beside freshly baked bread on the worktop counter on the other side of the cafe cashier.

_This is to Certify that **Lee Taeyong **and **Jung Jaehyun** _

_Were Officially Wed on the **14th **day of **July** in the year **2018**._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i took way too long to update this fic because i've been too busy writing johndo for a variety of reasons. so sorry i took way too long eventhough im supposed to be finished by today :3 but its ok, all will end with the final chapter :D
> 
> tw // brief mention of sexual assault

Detective Lee Donghyuck is very good-looking, Mark decides. 

He knows he’s attracted to guys, not girls. Maybe the first hint had been when Taeyong had extended a hand out towards him after his first lesson at the cram school, eyes sparkling with a kind of innocence that was rare in people of that age. Mark had been a tad infatuated, waking up to a semi-hard-on in the early mornings with the older man’s face lingering behind his eyelids. However, as time went on, and Mark met boys who jokingly offered him cigarettes in exchange for blowjobs, he came to realise that he was not opposed to doing that at all. 

He would like to kiss Lee Donghyuck, if he could, Mark Lee thinks. 

They are waiting here, in the community hall, and Donghyuck’s leg is jerking up and down due to nerves. Mark thinks that the community centre is too big, too white and too clean. The detective had told him to wait outside earlier, while he brought in the forensic expert named Jungwoo, and they had gone in and turned things around for a bit. Mark had been fascinated by the clouds, watching the white patterns swirl in the sky as they drifted along lazily with the wind. 

After what had seemed like forever, the two policemen had exited the community hall and Jungwoo had nodded stiffly at Donghyuck before taking his leave. Mark is aware of the security set up around the perimeter, discreetly, of course. He spots the junior detective, Jisung, at least that’s the name he remembers, lingering around the corner with a lollipop stuck in his mouth. 

Donghyuck waits for Jungwoo to turn around the corner before he heads back into the community hall. Mark slips through the door before it slides shut behind them with a soft thump, and it is just the two of them in the small hall with a raised platform right at the end.

“Are you sure they will come tonight?” 

He wonders how his voice actually sounds like to people who can’t see or hear him. Not like he had bothered to test the theory whenever people were around Donghyuck either, the only time he had spoken around someone else other than the detective was at that weirdly surreal meeting with the mysterious DY at the shrine surrounded by weeds. The older man didn’t appear to hear him, only Donghyuck did, so Mark thinks it’s yet another question that is going to go unanswered with his limited time as a spectre on earth. 

Donghyuck is clutching a silver can with a black nozzle in his hand, his eyes distant and lost somewhere that Mark cannot see. He inhales sharply once, before turning back to look straight at the ghost in the eye. 

“They will. I don’t think Jung Jaehyun is one to abandon his friends to their worries.” 

There are two chairs set up on the raised platform, Mark realises, a mini stage of sorts. Donghyuck walks over to the one on the right, sets down the can with a thunk and slides into the chair gracefully, crossing one leg over the other. He jerks his head towards the empty chair opposite him. Mark is confused. 

“Sit.”

Mark stares. Donghyuck makes an irritated clicking noise with his tongue. 

The seat of the chair is cool, but Mark hardly feels anything, being a ghost. He hikes a leg up, watches the detective opposite him fidget for a bit before Donghyuck relaxes backwards into his own chair, watching him with curious, lidded eyes.

“I’m curious,” the detective asks, deliberately not meeting Mark’s eyes with the statement. He doesn’t really go on, and Mark blinks back at him. 

“Go on. Ask whatever you want.” 

Donghyuck looks to the side, and there is red streaked across his cheeks. “Don’t want to be rude. It feels like an insensitive question now that I think about it.”

Mark laughs, and somewhere in him, he feels weirdly liberated with the movement. He doesn’t remember the last time he laughed at something that he genuinely found funny. When you are a teenage murderer, who has been chasing after drugs and cigarettes like you would find meaning in empty syringes almost your entire life, your life just seems like one very big joke that is funny to everyone but you. It’s kind of hard to laugh at anything, even if it was _actually_ funny. 

Lee Donghyuck has managed to make him laugh. 

It wasn’t even a joke, or something made out to be deliberately funny. Maybe it’s the fact that someone was actually _considerate_ of his feelings for once, someone was actually treating him like another human being, instead of just looking down at him over their nose like he was scum of the earth and deserved to rot in hell for the crimes that he had committed. 

“Nothing’s hardly insensitive at this point, detective,” he sweeps his hands out dramatically, looks to the side and feels a rare smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “I am dead. Nothing can hurt me anymore.” 

Donghyuck scoffs. “What a liar.” 

_What now?_ Mark blinks. “What?” 

“You’re lying,” Donghyuck responds shortly, crossing his arms carefully and finally turning back to look at Mark dead in the eye. “You say that you don’t care about what people say about you. You say that now that you’re dead, no words can hurt you. You say that in the first place, no one has ever cared about you, so that’s why you are so used to being alone.” 

“But you’re lying.” 

Mark feels the irritation swell in his chest, a mild itch that burns at the corners of where his heart should be. “I’m not. What makes you think I am?”

The detective exhales once, a harsh push of air through his teeth and stares Mark down unflinchingly. “It’s not so hard to admit that you want affection and validation, Mark Lee. We all crave it. We are all just human after all.” 

Well, that hit a nerve. 

Mark stares at the clean ceiling above him, inhales deeply through his corporeal lungs and internally counts to ten. It’s one of those things that he had taken away from psychological counseling, or therapy; those terms were kind of loose anyway, for someone who was considered a constant threat to society, a walking time-bomb. 

He hates that Detective Lee Donghyuck is right, hates that despite all the fucked-up things that he has been through, he _does_ crave affection and validation. Maybe that was why he had eagerly accepted Taeyong’s offer back then - an offer of a home, an unspoken invitation of acceptance, an unsaid assurance that _you are not alone, not anymore_. 

Then Mark had gone and fucked it all up. 

“Well,” he chooses his words carefully, watching the detective rock his chair back and forth opposite him. “You’re right, we all want these things. But after a while, you would think that the reason you haven’t been receiving them is because, maybe you just don’t deserve them. Especially when you are a teenage murderer who got high on illegally-obtained substances and killed the younger brother of the only person who ever cared about you, all in an impulsive fit fueled by a combination of bad decisions and irrational thoughts.” 

Lee Donghyuck just watches him closely, his foot tapping a steady rhythm against the tiled floor of the community hall. The sound echoes in the empty room, the clack of his dress shoe sharp and stark, and Mark just stares mutely at his translucent hands for a while before the detective speaks again. His voice is softer, a bit strained. 

“I’m sorry.” 

“No need to apologise.” No one has apologised to Mark ever. He had always been the one saying the words. Maybe it feels weird, having someone repeat them back to him. 

“How about this?” Donghyuck drags his chair closer, waits until Mark lifts his head to look back up at him. _He’s too close_ , Mark thinks, as the detective tilts his face even close, staring directly into Mark’s eyes. If Mark still had his physical body, maybe he would have felt Donghyuck’s warm breath ghost across his lips, maybe it would have sent a pleasurable kind of shudder down his spine and made warmth bloom in the pits of his stomach. 

Maybe, he would have leaned forward to kiss Lee Donghyuck on the lips. 

But he doesn’t. Mark just blinks up at the detective. There is a lingering warmth that aches just a little bit in his chest. 

“We’ll trade,” Donghyuck speaks quietly, the words a whisper settling in between the mere centimeters in between their lips. “I’ll answer a question that you have, you’ll answer one of mine. I know you have been wondering how come I can talk to you, how come I can see you, right? I’ll answer that burning question, even though I don’t like talking about it.” 

A challenge, Mark doesn’t like those. So he just stares back at the detective in the eye, bites down on his tongue out of habit. He doesn’t feel the pain anymore, but the movement is enough to remind him that it had always been a nervous tick when he was alive. 

“Alright,” his own words are just as ghostly as his being, lingering like a wisp of smoke perched precariously in the wind between his lips and Donghyuck’s. “I’ll answer your question then. _Only_ after you talk about why you can see ghosts of murder victims and talk to them.” 

The corner of Donghyuck’s mouth pulls up in a sly smirk, and Mark vaguely thinks about how roguishly attractive it makes him look. Less like a detective, more like the bad boys that Mark had been so hopelessly attracted to in the gangs he ran around - those that slapped him around for a bit for their own enjoyment. Maybe for a little bit of his. 

“Deal.” 

\-- 

“How did you realise that you came to, after you died?” 

Mark frowns. “I thought I was supposed to be asking the questions, Lee Donghyuck?” 

The detective snorts. “Finally, you call me by my name instead of just ‘detective’.” 

“Huh,” Mark snorts, shoving his hands into his pockets. “If you were that desperate for me to call you by your name instead of your rank, maybe you should have asked.” 

Donghyuck merely raises his eyebrows in response, unfazed by the jab. “Just answer.”

Mark huffs, digs through the memories in his head, the ones not related to his physical living life. He frowns after realising that the first memories that he reached for, the first one he remembers, is meeting Detective Lee Donghyuck in the alley bathed in the yellow light of the sunset, watching said detective pet a cat gently with the softest look in his eyes. 

“I woke up, and then I saw you, petting the cat.” 

“Ah,” Donghyuck blinks back at him. “So that was the first instance you were aware? That you weren’t a living human being, was it?” 

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I didn’t really question it. All I know is that I was dead, and somehow I just knew that you could see and hear me.” 

Donghyuck hums again, his eyes fixed on a corner of the hall. “What happened after I left?” 

“Uh,” Mark thinks again, feeling his forehead crease with the effort. “I don’t know. The next time I remember is standing in Jaehyun’s coffee shop watching you interrogate him. It appears that I can’t really wander off on my own. I can only appear around you.” 

“Correct,” Donghyuck lifts a finger in acknowledgement. “That’s what all the victims said. They can only appear before me, can only communicate with, and make eye contact with me. They can’t wander off, like ghosts supposedly can. This is provided that I have seen their corpse.” 

“Huh,” Mark stares back at the detective, who appears unaffected by this topic that is both gruesome and ghastly. “Does that mean that you saw my corpse before I met you for the first time in the alley?” 

Donghyuck nods, fingers continuing the rhythm that had been abandoned by his foot, tapping soundlessly against the sleek expensive fabric of his pants. “Yeah. Your body was reported by Jung Jaehyun, at the exact time that he said for his testimony. I was the first one from my team on the scene, as I was closest by at that time. I saw them put your body into the bag and zip it up before it went to the morgue.” 

“Oh,” the words taste like ash on Mark’s tongue, which doesn’t make sense because he’s not supposed to be able to taste anything. “I didn’t see my own body.”

The detective lifts a shoulder in an attempt at a shrug. “Maybe your subconscious just blocked it out, maybe it knew that you died a gruesome death, so it wanted to spare you the sight of your mutilated body. I was surprised that you didn’t appear then, honestly. Most victims are obsessed with seeing the crime scene that unfolds at the site of their death.” 

“I’m not particularly concerned with that, honestly,” Mark thinks about the blurry memories of when he was fifteen, his brain going at a million miles per hour, waking up to red splashed across Taeyong’s couch and immaculate floor, the same red seeping into his hands and leaving a permanent stain no matter how hard he scrubbed it off. “I think I have seen enough blood back then, when I murdered Jeno in a drug-induced high.” 

Donghyuck gestures vaguely. “Again, maybe it’s your subconscious protecting you.” 

Mark stares mutely at the detective in front of him, who has tilted his chair back and is resting his weight on the hind legs. “So, being a ghost that can communicate with you has its limitations. One, I can only appear around you, and I can’t go anywhere else. Two, I can’t exactly communicate with anyone else, and they can’t see me. My fields of interaction and presence are tied to you - not literally of course.” 

“Think about it like the planets orbiting the sun,” Donghyuck drops the chair back onto all four legs with a heavy _thump_ , his fingers still tapping that inconsistent rhythm on his thigh. Mark is hopelessly distracted by how his muscles strain against the fabric encasing them. “I’m like the sun, and you are a planet that can only exist within the orbit field around me. You are literally drawn to me, and I am drawn to you too, as we are the only two that can acknowledge each other in this humanly plane where you are not supposed to be anymore.” 

Mark blinks. That is quite a lot to take in.

“Okay,” the word falls from his lips quite unconvincingly. He’s not sure he totally understands that, but from what he can tell - he can only speak and interact with Lee Donghyuck, and he only comes into his ghostly existence when Lee Donghyuck is around too. He has tried it before, leaving Jaehyun’s coffee shop to go and walk the streets that had been like a prison to him before, only to step into darkness that consumed him wholly. The next time he had blinked his eyes open, he was in that forensic expert’s office, watching the group of detectives stare down at old photos of Jeno’s body and his fifteen-year-old mugshot. 

Donghyuck smiles again, the roguish quirk of his lips making Mark’s cheeks heat up again. “Don’t think too hard about it, Mark Lee. I’ll answer your question now.”

Mark almost falls out of his chair in excitement. He doesn’t. Instead, he scoots to the edge of his seat, grasps the sides as well as he can with his ghostly hands, and stares at the detective. 

“So there’s a story behind how you can see ghosts like me?” 

“Oh, come on. It’s not that exciting, honestly.” Donghyuck slides a hand through his hair, pushing his fringe back, and Mark thinks that it is _illegal_ for someone to look so attractive doing such a simple action. 

“There’s a bullet in my head.”

 _Wait, what?_ Mark blinks rapidly. _Did I hear that right?_

Donghyuck laughs, and the sound is music to Mark’s ears. The detective sounds so joyful, so carefree, despite the heavy information that he had just revealed. He thinks, maybe if he was still alive, he’d do _anything_ to make sure that Lee Donghyuck could continue laughing like _that_. 

“I was shot while canvassing the grounds beside a murder scene some time earlier this year,” Donghyuck sticks up his thumb and index finger, flicking it up in Mark’s direction to mimic a gun firing. “I couldn’t really remember a lot of details, very fuzzy. But I saw someone suspicious leaving the crime scene, so I pursued them. I was just about to catch up to them, but another figure came out from the alley and there was a gun in my face. That’s about it.” 

“Did it hurt?” 

Donghyuck giggles, and he looks at Mark fondly, laced with a little bit of disbelief and exasperation. “I wouldn’t know, really. But my head was pounding like a bitch when I woke up.” 

Mark isn’t fazed, despite the growing warmth in his stomach. Really, he isn’t.

“Couldn’t they remove the bullet?” 

“Too risky,” the detective shoves his hands back into the pockets, but not before glancing at his watch and once at the door of the hall. “I will eventually have to get it removed though. It’s just a matter of time. But for now, the bullet is in my brain, and it’s the main reason I can see and interact with murder victims. More specifically, the ghosts of the murder victims that I encounter, provided that I see their corpse like what I told you previously.” 

“Huh,” Mark absorbs the information provided to him curiously, rolls it around in his head for a bit. “So it means that if the bullet is removed, you won’t be able to see the ghosts of murder victims again?” 

“Most probably,” Donghyuck hums, staring at the door, waiting for their visitor to show up probably. Mark checks the clock hanging on the wall beside them. _Eight o’clock_. 

“I had a shock when I saw my first murder victim ghost, you know,” Donghyuck says casually, like it wasn’t something horribly traumatising, or like it wasn’t a shocking encounter with something supernatural and coming to terms with the fact that he suddenly had the ability to see the dead. “I remember her, a young teenger still in high school. She was standing beside her body on the table, staring down at it with the coldest look in her eyes. Then she looked at me, just made straight eye contact with me, and my heart just _broke_.” 

Mark doesn’t interrupt this time. Donghyuck is staring at a spot above his shoulder now, clearly a little too far in his own past while recounting his near-death experience. 

“She was a victim of sexual assault, in addition to murder,” the detective said quietly, “she just wanted justice for herself, that’s all. I spoke to her for the first time in the bathroom, after making sure that no one was around, of course. She told me exactly who her murderer, her rapist was. After that, it was just making sure that I asked the right questions and found appropriate evidence. He got off lighter than expected, being a son of an important politician. But at least he was put away for a bit.”

There is a question on the tip of Mark’s tongue that he’s afraid to ask. Donghyuck, on the other hand, seems to be aware of that very question. 

“She disappeared after we arrested the culprit,” he tells Mark quietly. There is it again, that distant look in Donghyuck’s eyes that makes him look older than he actually is. “I saw her, right there among the crowd under the flashing lights of the police sirens as we put him into the backseat of a police car, handcuffed and guilty. Then, she just smiled at me and disappeared.” 

Donghyuck fiddles with a loose thread of his sleeve and the corners of his mouth turn up in a small wistful smile. 

“It’s hard, being a detective you know,” he mutters, turning around to look at Mark again. “You can’t ever make promises that you can find the culprits, no matter how much you want to. For the families left behind, for the victims that are still suffering from trauma, even for the ghosts of those that have already had their lives cruelly taken away. But, there is never any guarantee that we can find the culprit, or even ensure that they are properly charged. So, I do what I can, with my ability to see the ghosts of victims, like you.”

Mark shakes his head. “But you promised me.” 

Donghyuck stares at him, and there is a soft sadness that curls around the ends of his eyes and lips. It makes something in Mark’s chest twist in an ache.

“You are special. In another life, maybe we would have been friends.”

 _Or even boyfriends_. 

“Thank you.” 

Donghyuck smiles at him, hikes one leg over another, and the soft smile turns into a full-blown grin. Just like that, the moment is broken - that one slip in time where they had both allowed themselves to imagine an alternate universe where they had met under different circumstances, more normal ones maybe. Maybe there was one where they had ran into each other on the university quad, became roommates, and then been forced to have their first kiss over a round of truth or dare mixed with spin the bottle. Maybe they would have gotten together, after a stupidly long time that involved Mark receiving text messages that were definitely not meant for him, and it would have ended (or began, depending on specificities) with them making out in Donghyuck’s bed all tangled up in each other on a dorm bed too small for them. 

“Your turn.”

It is Mark’s turn to stare back at him. “Huh?” 

“An answer for an answer,” Donghyuck doesn’t falter, “tit for tat.” 

Mark shrugs. “Ask away then.”

The detective watches his face carefully, eyes flickering to the clock to check the time before they land back on Mark. 

“What do you think you would have done, if you didn’t live this life as a teenage murderer?”

Huh, that _is_ a hard question. Mark has never thought about it before. His days have always been crowded with just merely living day to day, thinking about how to waste his time because he hated school so much, thinking about how he should get a new pack of cigarettes because he’s down to his last two sticks and he has no money in his wallet. He has never thought about having a future before, not one where maybe he had gone to university, or maybe even become a celebrity of sorts. 

Donghyuck laughs. “Don’t think so hard, Mark Lee. What would you have liked to do?” 

Mark bites down on his lower lip. “I would have liked to go to university maybe,” he says carefully, thinking about the pictures of Jung Jaehyun and Lee Taeyong pressed into each other's sides, their faces wide with open smiles and laughs despite the sweat streaking down their faces. “I wanted to go, honestly. I wanted to at least see if I could have made it in.”

“You definitely could have,” Donghyuck grins, “I’m sure you were a bright kid. Under the right circumstances, you would have flourished in your studies and gotten into a top university like Seoul National, no problem.” 

Ah, there is it again, the use of past tense. A constant reminder that Mark no longer has his physical body, that he no longer has a future. Like that girl that Donghyuck had described in his trip down memory lane, he will most likely disappear once they have arrested the culprit. There is no reason for him to linger around anymore, no matter how much he wants to take advantage of his newfound freedom of not being visible to anyone’s eyes for once. 

“Maybe,” he looks down at the floor, at Donghyuck’s polished dress shoes. “But there is no use talking about ‘maybes’, not when my life has already come to an end. I can’t exactly wake up in my body now, and I can never be free of my past or my sins of murder. It is what it is. I can’t exactly reverse things, or time. So, there’s no use talking about.”

“So what? You’re not allowed to dream just because you have sins?”

The acid in the detective shocks him to the point that his head snaps up again. He stares at Donghyuck, sitting opposite him in the chair, fingers tangled together on his lap, as he watches Mark with a hard look in his eyes.

“Huh?” 

“You’re allowed to think, to dream about these ‘could-have-beens’, Mark Lee,” Donghyuck’s voice is softer, a little gentler now. “It doesn’t if you have sins. We all have them, just some are worse than others. But there’s no harm in dreaming a little, thinking about an alternate universe, thinking about what could have happened if things were just a little different.” 

Mark blinks, and there it is again, that weird warmth in his chest whenever Lee Donghyuck speaks passionately but softly at him, words of assurance laced with an empathetic underlying hint of tenderness. No one has ever talked to him like that, except maybe Taeyong, before Mark had committed the brutal crime of murder and Taeyong had refused to speak to him, look his way, or even continue living in the same town that became Mark’s prison and living hell. 

“Yeah, then I would have liked to go to university,” he swallows, watching Donghyuck’s face cautiously. “I would have liked to attend classes, join a dance crew maybe, or even a rap crew. I would have liked to have a crush on a boy, who maybe also liked me back, and maybe we would have confessed to each other unintentionally while tipsy and kissed each other while the ball drops on the new year. I would have liked to then ask him to be my boyfriend, and then feel things in my chest that I have never felt before when he agrees with the cutest giggle and leans forward to kiss me to seal the promise.” 

He doesn’t say that in this very specific fantasy, he never used to have a face to put to it before. But now, with Detective Lee Donghyuck sitting before him, fifteen minutes before Jung Jaehyun and Nakamoto Yuta are supposed to show up, Mark has a very specific face to go with this very specific hypothetical universe. More precisely, it is the face of the detective sitting before him, looking at him with the faintest hint of affection and tenderness all over his face, with the softness of his mouth looking oh so very _tempting_ to Mark. 

“Very ordinary,” there is a snarky jab in Donghyuck’s voice, but the tone is fond. He smiles at Mark again, wide, open, tender in the way that makes Mark’s non-existent heart somersault in his equally non-existent chest. “But it suits you, Mark Lee. An ordinary life isn’t so bad.” 

There is a jangle of keys too loud from the other side of the door, and their heads snap towards it in unison. Donghyuck grins cheekily back at him, fingers reaching for the abandoned can beside his chair, and Mark feels something beat faster in his chest as the door creaks open and a familiar shock of brown hair peeks through. 

“Show time.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy birthday vic mi amor :3 please read her very cute very wholesome fic [keep it on the low](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26193175) to find the easter egg

**Author's Note:**

> (ノωヽ)
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/_doively) / [cc](https://curiouscat.me/doivelyz)


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